In July and August 2009, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College (CRR) conducted a survey to gauge three things: 1) how people were responding to the loss of their retirement assets due to the financial crisis; 2) who was responding by increasing their expected working life; and 3)...

A long and still growing strand of the retirement literature examines the role financial incentives play in the timing of the retirement decision. A more recent second strand of work has focused on the role of health shocks in the retirement decision. This paper combines these two components of...

Much as in previous recessions, the number of applications to public disability insurance programs increased sharply during the Great Recession. We find that the composition of applicants also changes across business cycles. For example, applicants during economic downturns, and especially...

In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Sullivan v. Zebley case fundamentally changed, albeit temporarily, the criteria under which children qualified for the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program based on disability. Instead of a system based on medical criteria alone, 1996...

Cross-sectional evidence in the United States finds that informal caregivers have less attachment to the labor force, measured both by the number of hours worked and labor force participation. The causal mechanism is unclear: do children who work less become informal caregivers, or are children...

The increase in the full retirement age in the Social Security program provides exogenous variation in the generosity in the Disability Insurance program, based only on birth year. We exploit this variation to estimate how responsive SSDI applications are to the financial incentive to apply. We...

This paper investigates the impact of a Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP) on the age of retirement of employees covered by defined benefit pension plans provided by the City of Philadelphia. We show that the program results in significant and substantial increases in the age of retirement:...