Workers often say they want to retire gradually. As retirement is a sharp break with life as they know it, it's not surprising that many prefer to negotiate the transition a step at a time. Many policymakers also view gradual retirement favorably. They see it as a way to extend careers, shorten...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has greatly increased the proportion of non-elderly Americans with health insurance. One justification for the ACA is that improving individuals’ access to health insurance would improve their health outcomes, mostly by increasing the probability that they have a...

Social Security's Representative Payee Program allows one individual to receive benefits on behalf of a retiree or disabled person who is incapable of managing them. In the case of retirees with cognitive impairment, the program could help prevent fraud by ensuring that Social Security benefits...

Any worker who delays claiming Social Security receives a larger monthly benefit due to the actuarial adjustment. Some claimants – particularly women, who are more likely to take time out of the labor force early in their careers – can further increase their benefit if the extra years of...

Some observers believe that investing a portion of the Social Security Trust Fund in equities would strengthen its finances and improve the program's intergenerational risk-sharing. However, equity investments would also expose the program to greater financial risk and potentially greater...

The option to claim Social Security before the full retirement age (FRA) has been around for over 50 years. But claiming benefits early has an inherent trade-off: more years of income are received in exchange for an actuarially reduced monthly benefit. The actuarial reduction is designed to be...

This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to explore the extent of a widening in life expectancies by socioeconomic status (SES) for older persons. We construct four alternative measures of SES, using educational...

This paper examines the relationship between age-related cognitive decline and three potential workplace outcomes: 1) coping with increased job difficulty; 2) shifting to a less cognitively demanding job; and 3) retiring early. It uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the O*NET...

Many state and local governments have responded to challenges facing their pension plans by cutting benefits. Will these cuts make it harder for state and local governments to recruit and retain high-quality workers? To date, the answer has been difficult to obtain; most micro-level datasets...

This paper summarizes what is known about leakages from existing studies and relates these results to detailed data on leakages in 2013 provided by Vanguard's How America Saves. It then uses two data sets – the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Survey of Income and Program...