Tax-advantaged savings plans—such as IRAs, Keogh, 401ks—have a significant tax cost. Understanding their roles and effectiveness in retirement funding is crucial to assessing whether their benefits outweigh their price. Until fairly recently, measuring these accounts’ economic impact was difficult because…
If Michael Hurd, Erik Meijer, Philip Pantoja, and Susann Rohwedder’s “Addition to the RAND HRS Longitudinal Files: IRA Withdrawals in the HRS, 2000-2014” were a home improvement project, the researchers would have put up spacious bookshelves in the Health and…
“This [project] is prompted by a question I’ve been asked by many reporters, which is ‘With larger, older cohorts and relatively scarce younger workers, will employers shift to employing more older workers for one reason or another?’” investigator David Neumark…
Many proposed reforms might have varying affects on retirees. In the 1940s, if a man lived to age 65, the full retirement age (FRA), he would, on average, live another 12.7 years in retirement, while a woman would live another…
Sometimes researchers create structural economic models to help understand the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI) trust funds’ solvency issues and to test possible solutions. Taking information (data) from real life, they build a picture of…
How to fix the solvency issues of the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI) trust funds, often referred to as the Social Security trust funds (OASDI), continues to concern policymakers and voters alike. As a pay-as-you-go…
While research often focuses on the retirement bound individual or couple, few people live their lives with no outside influences. A parent’s desire to lighten a child’s burden could have a negative impact on the parent’s retirement security, and such…
In September, Michigan Retirement Research Center (MRRC) was awarded its fifth five-year cooperative agreement renewal from the Social Security Administration. MRRC Director and Principle Investigator John Laitner explained that as part of the grant proposal, MRRC agreed to include disability…
Despite the growing number of studies and the increasing availability of detailed data, researchers haven’t developed a consensus on how health affects employment. This is partly explained by the wide variety in datasets (how they are collected, how they measure…
Brooke Helppie-McFall and Amanda Sonnega’s paper, “Characteristics of Second-career Occupations: A Review and Synthesis,” untangles the differences between career employment, second careers or re-careering, encore careers, bridge employment, and unretirement. The researchers define “second career employment as employment after leaving…
