Cross-national comparisons of data from developed countries offer useful insights into the retirement process and policy. Here we summarize findings for older persons age 50-70 using new microdata files collected by the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR) project, and we compare these...

The past few decades have witnessed a global move towards private provision for retirement through individual defined contribution pensions at the expense of publicly provided and employer-sponsored defined benefit pensions. As a consequence, workers and retirees are becoming increasingly...

To assess the distributional effects of social security reform proposals, it is essential to have good information on real-world workers’ lifetime earnings trajectories. Until recently, however, policymakers have relied on hypothetical earnings profiles for policy analysis. We use actual...

This paper evaluates potential responses to reductions in early Social Security retirement benefits. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) linked to administrative records, we find that Social Security coverage is quite uneven in the older population: one-quarter of respondents in their...

This paper explores how earnings variability is related to retirement wealth. Past research has demonstrated that the average American household on the verge of retirement would need to save substantially more, in order to preserve consumption flows in old age. While several socioeconomic...

This project explores the process by which older workers apply for, and are awarded, Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) benefits. Our focus is on how and whether DI serves as a path out of the labor market at older ages. This research is important to the extent that proposals to raise the...

This paper explores how earnings variability is related to retirement wealth. Past research has demonstrated that the average American household on the verge of retirement would need to save substantially more, in order to preserve consumption flows in old age. While several socioeconomic...

In order to understand whom among the non-disabled older population experiences a health problem later in life and applies for Social Security Disability Insurance, it is necessary to investigate patterns of coverage and reasons for non-coverage. This paper shows that while the safety net...

Social Security reform proposals are often presented in terms of their differential impacts on hypothetical or example workers. Our work explores how different benchmarks produce different replacement rate outcomes. We use the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to evaluate how Social Security...