Search Results
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
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
Medical Expenses and Saving in Retirement: The Case of U.S. and Sweden
Many U.S. households have significant wealth late in life, contrary to the predictions of a simple life-cycle model. In this paper, we document stark differences between U.S. and Sweden regarding out-of-pocket medical and long-term-care expenses late in life, and use them to investigate their role in discouraging the elderly from dissaving. Using a consumption-saving model in retirement with significant uninsurable expense risk, we find that medical expense risk accounts for a quarter of the U.S.-Sweden difference in retirees' dissaving patterns. Furthermore, medical expense risk affects ...
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 ...
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
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
Reverse mortgage loans: a quantitative analysis
Supersedes Working Paper 13-27. Reverse mortgage loans (RMLs) allow older homeowners to borrow against housing wealth without moving. Despite growth in this market, only 2.1% of eligible homeowners had RMLs in 2011. In this paper, the authors analyze reverse mortgages in a calibrated life-cycle model of retirement. The average welfare gain from RMLs is $885 per homeowner. The authors? model implies that low-income, low-wealth, and poor-health households benefit the most, consistent with empirical evidence. Bequest motives, nursing-home-move risk, house price risk, and loan costs all ...
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 ...
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
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.