2022

When Social Security survivor benefits exceed a surviving spouse’s own retired-worker benefits, it helps keep many surviving spouses out of poverty. Yet, access to survivor benefits differs by race by virtue of differences in marital histories, as well as in…

In this work, we will draw on existing surveys about Social Security knowledge to identify areas where knowledge differs across racial and ethnic groups. (We will also draw on a past MRDRC project, UM18-05, conducted by Katherine Carman.) We will…

We will estimate the long run impacts of health on employment by gender, education, and race in the United States and United Kingdom. Our structural framework allows us to disentangle employment drivers such as preferences, productivity, and benefit eligibility. We…

Imperfect knowledge of public programs influences take-up and can lead to suboptimal decisions. This project will quantify differences in Social Security program knowledge across race and ethnic groups. We will then estimate the relationship between these knowledge differences and observed…

Accommodations improve the employment outcomes of people with disabilities, although there are racial (and possibly ethnic) disparities in accommodation receipt. This project will investigate the effect of occupation, industry, and other factors on these disparities.

Growing United States income inequality and the increasing aging of Black and Hispanic populations point to greater risks of financial insecurity for older populations in coming years. Research on retirement determinants for Blacks and Hispanics is limited. We propose to…

This project builds on our current work examining how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected Americans’ financial well-being by using existing and soon to be collected data from the Understanding America Study (UAS). Our analysis will shed light on (1)…

To understand racial disparities in retirement age and financial preparedness, we construct a model of labor supply, retirement, and savings over the life cycle where all parameters, including preferences for time and risk and the stochastic processes of marriage, fertility,…

SSI and SSDI uptake are important mechanisms for workers with disabilities adjusting to negative shocks in the labor market. In this project, we aim to determine the extent to which structural barriers have excluded historically disadvantaged groups disproportionately affected by…

Creating a public resource of historical occupational information from the O*NET database linked with survey data in the HRS will allow researchers to better inform policy makers about the impact of long-term exposure to different types of tasks or work…