Project Year: 2015

Our project will explore how the timing of exits from the labor force and the claiming of Social Security benefits among military retirees differ from the general population including veterans who do not receive military retirement benefits. We ask: do military...

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) has recently added extensive new content addressing the use of Veteran’s Administration (VA) health services.  This new content will allow us to examine a wide range of determinants of such use, and racial differences in the...

The goal of this project is to assess the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the labor supply of Americans ages 50 and older. Our analysis focuses on the three key parts of the Affordable Care Act that are likely to play the largest roles for labor supply....

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is projected to reduce labor supply, and these reductions may be concentrated among workers nearing traditional retirement age. As we await data on labor force outcomes for 2014, reflecting the first full year of the law’s implementation,...

Changes to the Social Security Old Age benefits system introduced in the last decade have likely impacted individuals’ retirement decisions, and therefore their health insurance coverage. If a large proportion of older Americans decide to work in jobs covered by...

This proposal seeks to carry forward research into means testing social security structures and age pension programs through macroeconomic modelling and policy analysis. We will use models calibrated to both the Australian and US economies. Australia has a...

In this paper, the first analysis of its kind, we use comparable data from the US and England to examine similarities and differences in the level and trajectories of income and assets among households aged 70 and over. This allows us to shed light on the role of...

Immigrants have lower levels of annuitized wealth through Social Security and pensions than the native born, and they tend to hold a greater concentration of wealth in the form of housing. These facts suggest that there may be important differences in the saving and...

Previous literature has attempted to understand the effects of immigration on the Social Security system. To date, this research has been primarily limited to migrants in the U.S. and does not consider those who return to their countries of origin. Immigrants often...

Efforts to identify reasons for the reversal in the trend toward earlier retirement have yielded insights about, among other things, the roles of insurance, pensions, and Social Security. Less attention has been paid to the potential impact of occupational changes,...

Besides compensation and financial incentives, several other work-related factors may affect retirement decisions. Yet, there exists relatively little research documenting the extent to which job characteristics, such as autonomy, skill variety, task significance and...

How do individuals’ working conditions change over the course of their working lives? Do older workers prefer different kinds of jobs than younger workers? For example, are they willing to accept earnings losses to transition to jobs that are less physically demanding...

Recent work has provided evidence that older individuals are especially responsive to income taxes and will delay retirement when the tax code is more generous. Some of this work has included predictions of the labor supply effects of payroll tax reductions for...

This project will analyze how framing and loss aversion influence retirement and insurance decisions, particularly when people claim Social Security benefits and purchase life and long-term care insurance. Theory suggests that narrow framing and loss aversion play an...

The proposed research would investigate the possible negative relationship between age and financial decision-making ability. We will consider three main hypotheses. (1) Findings of a negative relationship between age and economic decision-making ability are not the...

We propose to address a variety of questions about the differences in wealth accumulated for retirement by veterans and nonveterans, the replacement rates in retirement for their earnings, and the reasons for any differences between veterans and nonveterans in their...

Reductions in the implicit taxation of Social Security benefits from reducing or eliminating the earnings test are an appealing means of encouraging labor supply of older individuals. The downside, however, is that the same policy reforms can encourage earlier...

The income replacement rate is widely used as a measure of economic preparation for retirement; yet it has a number of flaws. We propose to compare the income replacement rate with a consumption-based measure. We measure whether a household has, with high probability,...