2015

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 difficulty, stress and physical demands, work-hour…

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…

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…

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 important role…

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 consequences of a causal…

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 claiming…

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,…

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…