Funds from this grant support research by Harvard economist Richard Freeman that will link and then analyze 16 different data sets in order to examine the relationship between the increased employment/postponement of retirement by older workers and shifts in the demand for these workers associated with the changing composition of industries and the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic automation. Freeman will examine differences in employment and earnings of these workers by gender, education, health status, and income, and by industry, occupation, and firm and will study the impacts of these technologies on earnings, as well as employment. Overall, this project seeks to identify new patterns of work and retirement, determine their effect on worker well-being, and project whether these patterns are likely to continue among younger cohorts as they age. In addition to his own analysis, Freeman will commission 10 additional papers from leading economists using this new linked dataset, which will then be made available for public access through application to the Census Bureau research centers. All papers will be published as NBER Working Papers and submitted for publication in leading peer-reviewed journals.

This grant provides twenty months of continued support for a partnership between National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Associated Press (AP) to marry NORC’s research expertise with AP’s media reach to create a vehicle for promoting public understanding of the barriers and facilitators, as well as the causes and patterns, to people working beyond conventional retirement age in the United States. Funds from this grant will provide twenty months of salary support to a NORC-AP journalism fellow, who is selected through a competitive application process. The fellowwill cover the older work force beat, producing thoughtful, scientifically informed, high-quality articles on a variety of issues at the intersection of aging and work, including retirement, work and health, productivity, older workers and the gig economy, and the economic impact of an aging work force on businesses, pensions, and government programs like Social Security. In addition, NORC will field a high-quality, nationally representative survey of older adults about issues facing older workers with the results distributed nationwide through the AP. Survey reporting will be supplemented with reporting on new economic research on the older work force and survey data will be made freely available to researchers in a public-use dataset.