2021
Work Capacity Assessments for Disability Benefit Determinations: An International Comparison
WP 2021-438 , UM21-03
Disability protection programs constitute a critical safety net for individuals unable to work due to disabling health conditions. Yet countries differ along a number of dimensions in terms of how their social safety nets assist people with disabilities. Learning from…
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2020
Estimating the Macroeconomic Effects of Each Totalization Agreement
WP 2020-408 , UM20-07
Totalization agreements coordinate the United States Social Security program with other countries’ comparable programs. We estimate each totalization agreement’s impact on a variety of bilateral trade outcomes. We find the impact is quite heterogeneous, both across agreements/countries and across sectors…
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The Risk of High Out-of-Pocket Health Spending among Older Americans
WP 2020-409 , UM20-09
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, which may vary in how well they protect against the risk of high spending. This paper…
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A Framework for Cost-Benefit Analysis of Totalization Agreements
WP 2020-410 , UM20-08
International social security totalization agreements eliminate double social security taxation for workers who reside and work in different country from their home country. Because totalization agreements affect a number of economic agents in a variety of ways, we develop a…
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Cognitive Ability, Cognitive Aging, and Debt Accumulation
WP 2020-411 , UM20-11
In the past few decades, financial products target to consumers have become increasingly complex and recent evidence suggests that older adults are entering retirement with more debt than previous generations. We examine how cognitive ability is related to debt burdens…
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The Impact of Growing Health and Mortality Inequalities on Lifetime Social Security Payouts
WP 2020-412 , UM20-04
The prevalence of obesity, diabetes, and other health problems has increased in recent decades in the United States, and there is a growing gap between the health and longevity of individuals with high socioeconomic status (SES) and low SES. These…
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Saving Regret: Self-assessed Life-cycle Saving Behavior in the U.S. and Singapore
WP 2020-413 , UM20-17
Based on the belief that many people have under-saved and that the reason for under-saving is procrastination, paternalistic nudging to foster saving is often advocated by policy researchers. However, there is little empirical evidence that on hindsight individuals would wish…
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Nursing Homes in Equilibrium: Implications for Long-term Care Policies
WP 2020-414 , UM20-13
We build an equilibrium model of the market for nursing home care with decision-makers on both sides of the market. The nursing home demand arises as a result of stochastic dynamic optimizations by households heterogeneous in age, health, wealth; and…
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The Changing Nature of Work
WP 2020-415 , UM20-03
We provide new evidence on the changing nature of work and its influence on individuals’ capacity to work by linking historical measures of occupational job demands with harmonized data on individual abilities from a unique survey conducted in the RAND…
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Social Security Wealth, Inequality, and Life-cycle Saving: An Update
WP 2020-416 , UM20-16
Social Security wealth (SSW) is the present value of future benefits an individual will receive less the present value of future taxes they will pay. When an individual enters the labor force, they generally face a lifetime of taxes to…
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