Project Year: 2019

This project aims to quantify the effects of the totalization agreements that the United States has established since the late 1970s to coordinate its Social Security program with the comparable programs of other countries. Taking advantage of the fact that the...

The United States has signed international Social Security agreements, i.e. totalization agreements, with 30 countries in Europe, Asia, and South America. Totalization agreements have several benefits for persons who work in a foreign country during part of their...

There is mounting evidence that the health of older, working age adults, the most frequent claimants of DI benefits, is worsening.  At the same time, there is some evidence from SSA actuaries that after adjusting for demographic factors, the percent of insured workers...

We propose to develop a new method to assess individuals’ latent work capacity and relate it to: (1) their current employment status, and (2) their expectations about their probabilities of working at older ages. To do this, we will use a unique data set containing...

Insuring retirement security is an important challenge for our aging society. Accordingly, policymakers are interested in a range of policies to help individuals save more for retirement on their own. One reform currently being tested is for specific states to provide...

Both wealth and mortality inequality have increased, which will lead to greater aggregate Social Security payouts because individuals with greater annual benefits will live longer. An important question is whether the trend in mortality inequality will continue. We...

Real interest rates have been declining both in the U.S. and across the developed world. Some of the underlying global economic conditions that are thought to have caused this decline (e.g., world population growth and productivity slowdowns) are expected to persist....

Americans reach retirement with varying degrees of preparation, with many facing shortfalls in savings. We propose to use unique survey data collected among respondents to the Understanding America Study to measure the relative roles of subjective beliefs about...

State and local government pension plans cover about 19.5 million participants, and many participants are heavily reliant on these pensions for retirement income. Yet, most plans are underfunded. This proposed research will quantify how many Americans are entitled to...

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and nonelderly Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries face strong incentives not to work because their benefits could be sharply reduced. Most beneficiaries of Veterans Affairs (VA) Disability Compensation (DC)...

The validity and reliability of the tools SSA uses to assess claimant physical and mental functional capacity and physical and mental occupational requirements is critical to the effective provision of disability benefits and employment support services. This project...

This project will link survey and administrative data to investigate how within-couple differences in preferences and decision-making abilities affect household finances. We study whether misalignment of preferences or abilities influences choices and, thus,...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), we estimate the stochastic process for total medical spending and its components.  By focusing on dynamics, we consider not only the risk of catastrophic expenses...

The US incentivizes retirement saving in 401(k) and similar retirement accounts by permitting workers to defer taxes on contributions; taxes are then levied only when retirees withdraw their funds. Yet the Treasury foregoes over $100B/year due to tax-deferred...

This project aims to document household labor force participation responsiveness to social security program incentives in various countries. It will demonstrate anew the significance of these incentives using newly harmonized data on countries participating in the...