Publications

Same-sex marriage became legal nationwide in the United States on June 26, 2015. Federal legalization of same-sex marriage expands the pool of individuals potentially eligible for spousal Social Security benefits to the estimated 4 percent of the population that is…

This study is a literature review of research related to the characteristics of second careers undertaken after mid-life. There is a significant lack of literature directly on this topic, so we draw substantially from the literatures about retirement, bridge jobs,…

This is the first study to use longitudinal data to explore both the antecedents and consequences of fraud victimization in the older population. Because older persons are close to or past the peak of their wealth accumulation, they are often…

This paper examines how the 2014 reintroduction of the Social Security statement, staggered by every fifth birth year, affected American Life Panel respondents’ Social Security expectations, savings behavior, and labor supply. The rich panel design of the ALP allows for…

As workers age, their physical and cognitive abilities tend to decline. This could lead to a mismatch between workers’ resources and the demands of their jobs, restricting future work. We use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)…

In the United States, both taxes and old age Social Security benefits explicitly depend on one’s marital status. We study the effects of eliminating these marriage-related provisions on the labor supply and savings of two different cohorts. To do so,…

Expanded health-insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides alternative channels to obtain health-insurance coverage outside employment, which in theory may affect whether people want to work, how much they work, and the sorting of individuals into jobs. Although…

Previous research finds negative effects in the short and medium term for those who initially entered the labor force during weak labor markets. Discerning the effects of initial market conditions is difficult as young workers may attempt to time their…

The risk of labor market, health, and asset-value shocks comprise profound retirement savings challenges for older workers. Parents, however, may experience added risk if their children experience adverse labor market shocks. Prior research has shown that parents support their children…

We develop and estimate a model in which individuals make decisions on consumption, human capital investment, labor supply, and retirement. Unlike all previous work, our model allows both an endogenous wage process (which is typically assumed exogenous in the human…