Many older Americans are both healthy enough to work past conventional retirement age and want or need to stay in the labor market. But do employers need and want older workers? This grant to the Center on Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College aims to produce an enhanced understanding of the extent to which employers are ready and willing to hire and retain older workers. The CRR initiative will involve four separate, but integrated research projects. First, the CRR team will survey a large sample of employers to acquire their perceptions of the productivity and costs of their older workers relative to their younger ones. Second, they will analyze a large proprietary dataset provided by RetirementJobs.com, a nationally recognized job site for workers over the age of 50, and analyze the sorts of jobs being offered to workers on the site. Third, they will use multiple data sources to construct an index that ranks occupations by how easy it is for older workers to stay working or be hired into that occupation. Fourth, they will use data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Survey (LEHD), the Census Business Register (CBR), and the Longitudinal Business Register (LBR) to compare quantitative measures of worker value—the actual productivity (revenue per worker) and profitability (revenue divided by wages)—at firms based on the age distribution of their employees.

This grant supports a project by the Urban Institute, in partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, to harness the rich research findings from the Foundation’s Working Longer program to stimulate a meaningful, nonpartisan, fact-based policy discussion on older workers and retirement security. Urban Institute will not make specific policy recommendations, but instead will use Foundation-supported research to identify challenges and impediments to working past conventional retirement age and discuss how various policy reforms might both facilitate work at older ages and improve retirement income security. Supported activities include conducting a systemic review of findings of Sloan-supported articles, reports, and books on working longer; writing a synthesis report describing the policy implications of those findings; holding an expert roundtable to assess the merits of various reform options; conducting original policy analyses of the likely impacts of promising but understudied policy options that might facilitate work at older ages; producing and disseminating briefs, blog posts, and fact sheets that highlight the most promising reform proposals; and holding a series of public forums to engage federal and state policymakers.