Social Security faces a major financing shortfall. One policy option for addressing this shortfall would be to raise the earliest age at which individuals can claim their retirement benefits. A welfare analysis of such a policy change depends critically on how it affects living standards. This...

We study associations among women's current marital status, past marital history, and later-life labor force participation. We first document these relationships using data from the 1986 to 2008 waves of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We then exploit variation in laws...

How accurate are older people's expectations about their future Social Security benefits? Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare respondents' observed Social Security claiming ages and benefits with subjective expectations provided during their 50s and early 60s. We...

In this paper, we use micro data on a large number of European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to examine the wealth accumulation (saving) behavior of the retired elderly in Europe. To summarize our main findings, we find that less than half of the...

In recent decades, many states have reduced future retirement benefits for newly hired teachers. We estimate that in 2020 the average initial monthly retirement benefit, for teachers retiring with 30 years of service, is 11.2 percent lower than that of teachers retiring in the same plan with the...

We construct a database of public pension policy changes with motivation and implementation information for ten OECD countries. Structural pension reforms, motivated by long-run sustainability concerns, often come with prolonged phase-in periods. In response to pension retrenchments implemented...

We estimate the impact of public pension systems on labor supply far from the normal retirement age by exploiting Poland's switch from a Defined Benefit to a Notional Defined Contribution scheme for men born after 1948. Using the universe of taxpayers and this sharp cohort-based discontinuity in...

Twenty years ago, the adjustment to monthly Social Security benefits for early or delayed claiming was, on average, roughly actuarially fair, although some subsets of individuals could gain from delay. Since then, delaying claiming has become much more attractive thanks to three factors: a more...

Despite its centrality in monetary policy, communication is not a focus in social security reform. We investigate the potential for active communication to dissipate apparently widespread public confusion about the future of social security. We implement a simple information treatment in which...

Empirical evidence suggests that individuals often evaluate options relative to a reference point, especially seeking to avoid losses. We undertake the first welfare analysis under reference-dependent preferences. We characterize the welfare impact of changes in reference points and prices,...