Search Results
Working Paper
Long-Run Intergenerational Effects of Social Security
Both historically and today, support of aging parents has largely taken the form of in-kind transfers that require physical proximity, such as housing and caregiving. If Social Security substitutes for such support, it can relax constraints on where recipients' children live and work. We investigate the long-run intergenerational effects of the early Social Security program, exploiting within-occupation, cross-industry differences in coverage, and a new dataset linking parents to their children's later-life outcomes. We find that sons whose parents had greater predicted coverage moved farther ...
Working Paper
The Economic Status of People with Disabilities and their Families since the Great Recession
People with disabilities face substantial barriers to sustained employment and stable, adequateincome. We assess how they and their families fared during the long economic expansion thatfollowed the Great Recession of 2007-09, using data from the monthly Current PopulationSurvey (CPS) and the March CPS annual income supplement. We find that the expansionbolstered the well-being of people with disabilities and in particular their relative labor marketengagement. We also find that applications and awards for federal disability benefits fell duringthe expansion. On balance, our results suggest ...
Working Paper
Decomposing Recent Employment Gains Among Disabled Workers
We use the longitudinal component of the Current Population Survey to compare transition rates into and out of disability and employment prior to and after the onset of the pandemic. We find that one-third of the increased employment rate among disabled people is due to the excess incidence of disability seen following the pandemic, while the other two-thirds is attributable to higher participation among people whose disabilities were unrelated to the pandemic. Further, we find evidence that these increases are concentrated in occupations with higher rates of telework.
Working Paper
Inequality in Comprehensive Wealth
We create an annualized measure of comprehensive household wealth using the 1998–2022 waves of the Health and Retirement Study and examine heterogeneity in retirement resources across households, cohorts, and time. We augment traditional net worth with the actuarial present values of expected future payment streams from labor-market earnings, Social Security, defined-benefit pensions, annuities, life insurance, and government transfers. We then calculate an annualized measure of that lump sum by converting it into an actuarially fair joint life annuity that we call annualized comprehensive ...
Working Paper
Occupational Choice, Retirement, and the Effects of Disability Insurance
There is much variation in the physical requirements across occupations, giving rise to great differences in later-life productivity, disability risk, and the value of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). In this paper, I look at how such differences across occupations affect initial career choice as well as the extent to which SSDI, which insures shocks to productivity due to disability, prompts more people to choose physically intense occupations. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), I estimate a dynamic model of occupational ...
Working Paper
Labor Force Transitions at Older Ages : Burnout, Recovery, and Reverse Retirement
Partial and reverse retirement are two key behaviors characterizing labor force dynamics for individuals at older ages, with half working part-time and over a third leaving and later re-entering the labor force. The high rate of exit and re-entry is especially surprising given the declining wage profile at older ages and opportunities for re-entry in the future being uncertain. In this paper we study the effects of wage and health transition processes as well as the role of accrues work-related strain on the labor force participation on older males. We find that a model incorporating a work ...
Working Paper
Social Security and High-Frequency Labor Supply: Evidence from Uber Drivers
We estimate the impact of anticipated transfers on labor supply using confidential driver-level data from Uber. Leveraging the staggered timing of Social Security retirement benefits within each month and a novel identification strategy, we find that the labor supply of older drivers declines by 2% on average in the week around benefit receipt—a precisely estimated but economically small effect. Individual-level analyses reveal that the average effect obscures heterogeneous micro-behavior: while the majority of drivers does not meaningfully adjust labor supply in response to social security ...
Working Paper
Set it and Forget it? Financing Retirement in an Age of Defaults
Retirement savings abandonment is a rising concern connected to defined contribution systems and default enrollment. We use tax data on Individual RetirementAccounts (IRAs) to establish that for a recent cohort, 0.4% of retirement-age individuals abandoned an aggregate of $66 million, proxied by a failure to claim over ten years after a legal requirement to do so. Analysis of state unclaimed property databases suggests that workplace defined contribution plans are abandoned at a higher rate than IRAs. Finally, regression discontinuity estimates show that certain accounts created by default ...
Working Paper
Who Cares? Paid Sick Leave Mandates, Care-Giving, and Gender
We use employment data from the Current Population Survey to assess the efficacy of state-mandated paid sick leave policies on leave-taking behavior with a focus on any variation by gender. We find that these policies increase leave taking for care-giving for men by 10-20%, and this effect is strongest for men with young children in the household. In addition, we find that Hispanic men and men without a bachelor’s degree, who historically have had low access to paid sick leave, are 20–25% more likely to take care-giving leave. By comparison, we do not find evidence that these policies ...
Journal Article
Duration Dependence and Composition in Unemployment Spells
This article reviews the evidence for duration dependence in job-finding rates and its implications for the unemployment duration distribution. The authors document duration dependence and show that it exists within nearly every demographic subgroup. Then, they examine the implications of duration dependence on unemployment duration, emphasizing that a uniform job-finding rate that does not incorporate duration dependence understates unemployment duration. Finally, they explore a composition-based approach to duration dependence, where they solve for the distribution of preexisting ...