This paper examines the distributional implications of introducing additional means testing of Social Security benefits where proceeds are used to help balance Social Security's finances. Benefits of the top quarter of households ranked according to the relevant measure of means are reduced...

The budgets of a growing number of older Americans are stressed by mounting debt loads as elders struggle to pay for necessities such as groceries, prescription drugs, and urgent home repairs. Debts levels of the elderly have taken a sharp turn for the worse since the early 1990s. Older persons...

Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder have put pressure on firms to communicate their support for the cause by increasing racial diversity in hiring and brand communications. Using a novel data set, we examine changes in the racial pay gap in influencer marketing...

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the effect of the newly increased minimum wage, as per the Fair Labor Standards Act, on the unemployment rate. While Congress executed the Act to help lower class workers, they executed it negligently in a recession that has been intense and ongoing....

Most research measuring disparities in wealth by race relies on data that exclude resources that are disproportionately important to low-wealth and non-white families, namely defined benefit (DB) pensions and Social Security. This paper finds that once these resources are included, disparities...

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the effects of the Great Recession on the wealth held by the near retirement age population from 2006 to 2012. For the Early Boomer cohort (ages 51 to 56 in 2004), real wealth in 2012 remained 3.6 percent below its 2006 value....

This paper uses asset and labor market data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to investigate how the recent "Great Recession" has affected the wealth and retirement of those in the population who were just approaching retirement age at the beginning of the recession, a potentially...

This paper advances the specification and estimation of models of retirement and saving in two earner families. The complications introduced by the interaction of retirement decisions by husbands and wives have led researchers to adopt a number of simplifications to increase the feasibility of...

Retirement Study? This article uses household wealth and labor market data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to investigate how the recent "Great Recession" has affected the wealth and retirement of those approaching retirement age as the recession began, a potentially vulnerable...

This paper specifies and estimates a structural life cycle model of retirement and wealth that explains the peaks in retirement both at ages 62 and at 65. Our estimates suggest that leisure and time preference are widely distributed among the population, with a bimodal distribution of time...