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Working Paper
Health, Health Insurance, and Retirement: A Survey
The degree to which retirement decisions are driven by health is a key concern for both academics and policymakers. In this paper we survey the economic literature on the health-retirement link in developed countries. We describe the mechanisms through which health affects labor supply and discuss how they interact with public pensions and public health insurance. The historical evidence suggests that health is not the primary source of variation in retirement across countries and over time. Furthermore, declining health with age can only explain a small share of the decline in employment ...
Briefing
Lifetime Medical Spending of Retirees
Retirees face considerable medical expenses during their remaining lives. Model simulations suggest that although a large amount of that spending can be predicted ? based on attributes such as income, health, and marital status ? there remains significant dispersion. Households with heads who turned seventy in 1992 will incur $122,000 in medical spending on average, including out-of-pocket expenditures and Medicaid payments. But the top 5 percent of households will incur more than $300,000 in such spending. The level and dispersion of this spending diminish only slowly with age.
Journal Article
The Rapidly Growing Home Care Sector and Labor Force Participation
The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the growing need for home care workers, who support their elderly and disabled clients in their homes with activities of daily living, and on the challenges of recruiting and retaining workers in the industry. This brief describes the state of the home care sector and its connection to the economy. It looks at home care as a rapidly growing industry facing significant challenges and at home care’s role in enabling working-aged family members to participate in the labor force,i which supports the Federal Reserve’s maximum employment mandateThere is ...
Working Paper
Old, sick, alone, and poor: a welfare analysis of old-age social insurance programs
Poor health, large acute and long-term care medical expenses, and spousal death are significant drivers of impoverishment among retirees. We document these facts and build a rich, overlapping generations model that reproduces them. We use the model to assess the incentive and welfare effects of Social Security and means-tested social insurance programs such as Medicaid and food stamp programs, for the aged. We find that U.S. means-tested social insurance programs for retirees provide significant welfare benefits for all newborn. Moreover, when means-tested social insurance benefits are of the ...