Search Results
How Financially Fit Are American Retirees?
From 1989 to 2016, the wealth of retired households increased in real terms. But data also indicated that wealth inequality worsened among retirees.
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 ...
Retirements Surge for Older Workers during COVID-19
Though retirement decisions vary by different age groups, the COVID-19 pandemic increased retirement rates for those age 66 and older.
Journal Article
To Retire or Keep Working after a Pandemic?
Workers age 55 and older left the labor force in large numbers following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Four years later, participation within this age group has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, despite the strongest labor market in decades. This has resulted in an estimated shortfall of nearly 2 million workers. Analysis shows that the participation shortfall is concentrated among workers in this age group without a college degree and can be explained by increased and growing retirement rates for this group, above pre-pandemic trends.
Working Paper
Time Averaging Meets Labor Supplies of Heckman, Lochner, and Taber
We incorporate time-averaging into the canonical model of Heckman, Lochner, and Taber (1998) (HLT) to study retirement decisions, government policies, and their interaction with the aggregate labor supply elasticity. The HLT model forced all agents to retire at age 65, while our model allows them to choose career lengths. A benchmark social security system puts all of our workers at corner solutions of their career-length choice problems and lets our model reproduce HLT model outcomes. But alternative tax and social security arrangements dislodge some agents from those corners, bringing ...
Working Paper
Dissecting the Great Retirement Boom
Between 2020 and 2023, the fraction of retirees in the working-age population in the U.S. increased above its pre-pandemic trend. Several explanations have been proposed to rationalize this gap, such as the rise in net worth due to higher asset returns, the labor market's deterioration due to higher unemployment risk, the expansion of fiscal support programs, and increased mortality risk. We quantitatively study the interaction of these factors and decompose their relative contribution to the recent rise in retirements using an incomplete markets, overlapping generations model with a ...
Working Paper
Dissecting the Great Retirement Boom
Between 2020 and 2023, the fraction of retirees in the working-age population in the U.S. increased above its pre-pandemic trend. Several explanations have been proposed to rationalize this gap, including increases in net worth, the deterioration of the labor market with higher job separations, the expansion of fiscal transfer programs, and higher mortality risk. We develop an incomplete markets, overlapping generations model with a frictional labor market to quantitatively study the interaction of these factors and decompose their contributions to the rise in retirements. We find that new ...
Retirements, Net Worth, and the Fall and Rise of Labor Force Participation
New research suggests that declining asset values in 2022 may have prompted older workers to return to the labor force.
Newsletter
Savings after Retirement: A Survey
Retired U.S. households, especially those with high income, decumulate their assets more slowly than implied by the basic life cycle model. The observed patterns of out-of-pocket medical expenses, which rise quickly with age and income during retirement, and longevity, which also rises with income, can explain a significant portion of U.S. retirement saving. However, more work is needed to disentangle these precautionary motives from other motives, such as the desire to leave bequests.
Newsletter
Reforming Social Security to Save Social Security
The biggest social safety net in the United States is the Social Security program, which provides retirement benefits totaling almost $900 billion to 54 million individuals. It is a concern for all but the wealthiest, then, that Social Security faces insolvency: The U.S. Social Security Administration predicts that in 2020, the costs of the program will exceed its income. This suggests it is critical for policymakers to evaluate whether there is a path for social security reform that will improve people?s welfare both before and after retirement while restoring the program?s solvency.