The most popularly used survey of older Americans-the National Institute on Aging's (NIA) Health and Retirement Study (HRS)-has a limited number of questions that address with any specificity the ways that Americans work into their 60s and 70s as they transition from full-time employment to full-time retirement. What is needed is an opportunity to devise and test questions that will better capture the aspirations, expectations, and work patterns of aging Americans so as to improve the measurement and modeling of older Americans' evolving labor market behaviors. This grant to fund the work of New York University economist Andrew Caplin provides such an opportunity. Caplin has formed a partnership with NIA and Vanguard, one of the world's largest investment management companies, to createe a panel of older Americans, entitled, the MINYVan panel. This MINYVan panel will allow Caplin and colleagues to experiment with questions that will better measure labor market preferences and opportunities of an aging population. They will also pose questions concerning expectations of future work and pay and questions concerning hypothetical behavior in various possible future contingencies. For example, they will investigate whether or not an individual who chooses to stop work believes that they would be able to return to work for high pay at some point in the future. By studying panel responses Caplin and colleagues will begin to develop appropriate structural models of labor market behavior and design a complementary survey that will focus on labor market preferences and behaviors. This work will not only yield interesting insights in itself, but will be useful to future discussions about how how labor-market activities questions on the HRS can be made more robust.

This grant funds research investigating demand for older workers in labor markets and how the behavior of firms affect older worker's decisions to work beyond conventional retirement age. Led by Till Von Wachter, previously of Columbia and now at UCLA and RAND, David Card of UC Berkeley, and Lars Vilhuber of the U.S. Census Bureau, the research team will analyze the role of firms in labor force transitions of older workers in the United States, with a comparative analysis to firm behaviors in Germany. Their research addresses four critical questions. "First, do common firm-level events, such as mass layoffs and plant closings, contribute significantly to observed retirement rates? Second, is there a significant difference in the rate of early retirement among firms (net of worker characteristics)? Third, do differences in firm-specific retirement rates correlate with more commonly studied firm-level differences in wages and productivity, and what do the results imply for the sources of firm-level differences in retirement rates? Fourth, is the role of firms in retirement similar in Germany?" In addition to providing valuable insights, the effort promise to draw scholarly attention to the need for additional research on the demand side of the older worker labor market.

This grant funds a project by sociologist Chandra Muller and economist Sandra Black at the University of Texas to re-contact and survey the nationally representative High School and Beyond (HSB) sophomore class cohort, a sample of nearly 15,000 individuals, just before most turn 50 years old. The original HSB surveyed this cohort every two years from 1980 to 1986, and again in 1992. Data collected include metrics on cognitive and noncognitive skills, parent and teacher evaluations, high school transcripts, student financial aid records, utilization patterns of public entitlement programs, college transcripts, early-life work experiences, and answers to detailed student questionnaires. Resurveying this cohort now, more than 30 years after the initial survey, will create a uniquely rich and robust public use dataset that will enable scholars from diverse disciplines to study in previously unavailable detail the relationship between early-life human capital and later-life outcomes.

Lack of confidence about the future of Social Security has led many Americans mistakenly to believe that they had better file for Social Security benefits as soon as they are eligible (typically when they turn 62), so they can lock in their benefits before Social Security "is gone." Yet Social Security's finances are more secure than most Americans think, and analysis shows that for the typical American it is economically advantageous to start taking benefits no earlier than full retirement age (now 66) and in many cases to delay taking benefits until age 70. To help American workers make retirement decisions based on accurate information, it is imperative to both clarify the future of Social Security's finances and its capacity to meet future benefit commitments and to communicate the advantages of delaying benefits. Funds from this grant support a project by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) to design and execute an integrated public education initiative aimed at helping middle- and lower-income Americans understand how they can enhance their long-term retirement security by working longer and delaying receipt of Social Security benefits. NASI will produce a series of accurate, high-quality written, visual, and graphic materials accessible to the public that will lay out the economic advantages of working longer and delaying Social Security and combat commonly held misconceptions about the economics of retirement. Based on the most up-to-date research, the materials will then be disseminated to the public through financial planners, HR professionals, journalists, and non-profit community-based grassroots organizations.