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 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...

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 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...

Numerous studies have found that even as employment growth in high- and low-skill occupations has been robust, employment in middle-skill occupations such as office administration and manufacturing is in long-term decline. The timing of this decline could not be worse for the older workers...

Official estimates of elderly poverty do not take into account either the medical needs of the elderly, which can be quite extensive, or the assets at their disposal, which may also be extensive. The new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) explicitly takes into account medical needs but has been...

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...

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...