The employment of older workers into their mid-60s will be critical to their ability to ensure a secure retirement. One of the risks threatening the ability to work to older ages is being “displaced,” with displacement defined as the elimination of the worker’s job due to a shift in the...

Economic conditions and labor force participation vary significantly across the states of the Union. Despite these marked differences, little is known about the reasons for such variations in retirement patterns. Using the Current Population Survey for the period 1977-2007, this paper...

While growing fiscal pressures and increasing life expectancy have prompted calls to raise retirement ages so that lifetime benefits would be concentrated in older ages, some fear that this change—without other adjustments—might harm long-career, lower-wage workers. Tying retirement benefit...

One potential way to manage the rapidly growing costs of supporting older Americans is to increase labor supply at older ages. However, questions persist about the quality of available jobs. This study examines older Americans’ employment opportunities by studying job changes at older ages....

This paper develops and estimates a closed-form model of Bayesian learning of subjective survival beliefs within the framework of Choquet decision theory. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) indicate that, on average, young respondents underestimate their true survival probability...

In this report, we assess the economic well-being of elderly women in cross-national perspective, comparing the United States to four other rich countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. These countries constitute an illuminating group, as they have diverse social policy...

This paper uses a panel data set of 85 countries covering 1960-2005 to investigate the macroeconomic linkages between national rates of saving and investment and population aging. The issue takes on added significance because of the recent suggestion that the decline in global interest rates has...

This paper estimates how much people actually receive in retirement relative to earnings before retirement when all sources of income, including income generated by homeownership, are combined. Previous studies find that middle class people need between 70 and 75 percent of their pre-retirement...

Our project uses DYNASIM3, the Urban Institute’s dynamic microsimulation model of the U.S. population, to simulate several alternative systems of Social Security auxiliary benefits. We specifically consider earnings sharing, a system in which a husband’s and a wife’s earnings records are...

Although health and employment shocks are fairly common at older ages and often derail retirement savings plans, Social Security’s disability insurance, spouse and survivor benefits, and progressive benefit formula may provide important protections. By contrast, traditional employer-sponsored...