Project Year: 2020

Some studies have raised concerns that many households reach retirement with limited financial resources. The behavioral economics literature posits that procrastination may be an important explanation. We fielded a survey in the RAND American Life Panel, asking...

Household wealth inequality in the U.S. has been rising, but those measures do not include Social Security. For individual Social Security participants, Social Security Wealth (SSW) is equal to the present value of future benefits less the present value of future...

While there is some research on the prevalence of bridge employment and partial retirement behavior from the worker perspective, we have no evidence about firms’ ability and willingness to accommodate worker demands for job amenities as they transition into...

The proposed research will identify the causes and disability consequences of prescription opioid and benzodiazepine use among Americans older than 50, including the role of state prescription drug policies in the use and effects of these drugs. These drug classes are...

Long-term care is one of the most significant risks Americans face in late life. About a third of Americans older than age 70 need help with Activities of Daily Living, requiring either a nursing home or community- and home-based care. The cost of long-term care is so...

Dementia, a chronic, degenerative disease characterized by deteriorating cognition, represents a particularly aggressive threat to older adults’ financial well-being.  Dementia-linked adverse financial events have the potential to deteriorate retirement savings,...

Financial product complexity has increased substantially in the past few decades and recent evidence suggests that older adults are entering retirement with more debt than previous generations. This project will examine how cognitive ability and cognitive aging are...

We will estimate the total, Medicare, Medicaid, and out-of-pocket medical expenditures among the elderly across the income gradient. We will assess the risk of medical spending and how it is reduced through Medicaid and Medicare. We will also estimate the incidence of...

Traditional Medicare imposes significant cost-sharing on beneficiaries. Most but not all beneficiaries obtain supplemental insurance – through Medigap, Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, or employer-sponsored retiree coverage – but these policies vary in how well they...

Social Security totalization agreements affect a number of economic agents in a variety of ways. We propose to develop a cost-benefit framework of totalization agreements to facilitate the comparison of these effects and their assessment from a cost-benefit...

This paper aims to quantify the effects of each Social Security totalization agreement that the United States has established since the late 1970s. We combine the recently developed synthetic control method with event-study analyses by constructing, for each country...

Adjustments to benefits for individuals who delay claiming are designed to reward work and ensure equitable treatment between those who delay and those who claim early. Over the past 20 years, Social Security claiming ages have increased and become more dispersed....

Abstract: This research compares the retirement choices and economic well-being of public sector employees who are covered by Social Security to those who are uncovered. I use a data set of public employees from 12 waves of the HRS that includes detailed pension...

Individuals with higher socioeconomic status tend to live longer than those with lower SES. The gap in survival rates has widened in recent decades, potentially affecting aggregate Social Security payouts. In prior research we forecast mortality stratified by SES...

After decades of growth, since 2010 both applications and awards for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) have steadily declined. This decline in SSDI applications has not been accompanied by an improvement in overall health as measured in national surveys....

We will use data from Veteran’s return to work after disability onset to describe how age and education affect work. This will give SSA information that could improve the disability determination process (help make more accurate determinations using a vocational...

The decision to apply for DI is based on the interplay between one’s health, the demands of one’s job, employer accommodations, and the ability to find a new job that better matches health status and job demands. In the proposed research, we explore how changes in the...