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.

This grant provides four years of renewed support to a postdoctoral fellowship program run by the National Bureau of Economic Research which supports talented young researchers interested in working on the economics of an aging workforce. Fellows receive a one-year stipend to carry out research at NBER’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as limited funds for research-related purposes. In addition, fellows have the opportunity to participate in NBER’s weekly lunch seminars, NBER’s Summer Institute workshops on Aging and Labor Studies, relevant activities related to the larger NIA-NBER fellows program on Aging, and collaborative research and networking activities with a similar postdoctoral fellowship program at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Selection of the three fellows per year will be made by a panel of experts who are members of both the Aging and Labor Studies NBER programs. Nicole Maestas of Harvard University will chair the selection committee, which will include leading scholars in the fields of labor economics and the economics of aging. The committee’s decisions will be based on their evaluation of the fellows’ potential to make an important contribution to the understanding of the behavior of older workers and the functioning of labor markets for these workers.

To make sound decisions about potential changes to Social Security, Medicare, and other retirement programs, policymakers need reliable, objective predictions based on the best available data on how reforms would likely affect retiree income and benefits, labor market activities, taxpayer burdens, and program costs and solvency. The predictions are often provided by DYNASIM, the Urban Institute’s well-respected microsimulation model. This grant funds a project by the Urban Institute to expand and improve the DYNASIM model. DYNASIM is a more ambitious tool than nearly every policy evaluation model in use today. It attempts to predict a wider range of outcomes than do most models developed by CBO or the analytical offices of Cabinet agencies. For example, a raise in the early and full retirement ages would almost certainly affect retirement ages, earnings, savings patterns, and the distribution of incomes of those 60 to 74 years in age. It may also influence marriage rates and living arrangements, and could indirectly affect the health status and health insurance coverage of some older Americans. Simple models often focus on just one or two of these outcomes. DYNASIM’s predictions, however, attempt to capture all these indirect effects. With this grant, the Urban Institute will develop further the predictive capabilities of DYNASIM so that the model can be used to produce credible and detailed predictions of the impact of government policy reforms that affect the nation’s elderly. The programs of interest include Social Security, including its Disability Insurance (SSDI), Medicare, tax policies that affect retirement saving, and important components of Medicaid. The grant will examine how reforms in one or more of these programs will affect old-age labor supply, the prevalence of old-age poverty, the distribution of income in old age, out-of-pocket spending on health care in old age, and tax burdens of the elderly. The DYNASIM model will also produce predictions of the effects of these policy changes on both the elderly and the nonelderly. In addition to providing for the needed improvements, the grant includes funds to maintain DYNASIM during the project period, such as by incorporating the latest economic and demographic assumptions used by Social Security and updating tax and other policy parameters. In addition, the Urban Institute team will use some funds to train additional DYNASIM analysts, to ensure the sustainability of the model, and to find ways to provide access to other researchers, so that it can continue to provide the research and policy community with the best information on the effects of retirement policy reforms after the grant period ends.

This grant supports an ongoing NBER project, the International Social Security (ISS) project, led by Courtney Coile and Axel Bцrsch-Supan, that will examine a variety of retirement and social safety net reforms that have been implemented in other countries, including Canada, Japan, and nine European countries. Teams of investigators from 12 countries (11 mentioned above and the U.S) will examine the precise financial incentives associated with those reforms and the effects of the changed financial incentives on work, retirement, and claiming behavior at older ages. The studies will use a common template, which will enable meaningful, if complicated, comparisons across countries. While the institutional and cultural contexts differ across countries to various degrees, the commonality of demographic pressures and the limited scope of options for restoring financial sustainability to retirement programs make the experiences of other countries directly relevant to Social Security reform discussions in the United States. 

This grant funds follow-up research by Harvard’s Nicole Maestas in the aftermath of the 2015 American Working Conditions Survey (AWCS). The AWCS is alone among major workplace surveys in its attention to cataloging both the pecuniary and the nonpecuniary characteristics of jobs, which allows researchers to analyze how these characteristics shape older Americans’ decisions regarding working into later ages. In tandem with the AWCS, Maestas fielded a stated preference experiment designed to assess how much older workers value different job characteristics. Funds from this grant will allow Maestas to reconnect with survey participants three years after the original ACWS survey, allowing the collection of new data and enabling a clearer look into both how workplace characteristics shape retirement decisions and the dynamics of how worker preferences about the desirability of various workplace characteristics change over time. 

Our understanding of the size and characteristics of the alternative work force—freelance workers, contract workers, contingent workers, on-call workers, temporary workers, etc.—is severely limited by inadequate federal surveys. They are inadequate in several ways: lack of a clear and agreed upon taxonomy of work; questionable phrasing of questions; sporadic fielding of the surveys; and failure to take into account entirely new forms of work, often referred to as the gig economy, the platform economy, or the on-demand economy.   The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is fielding its first Contingent Work Survey (CWS) in 10 years. This grant funds a project by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Edward Freeland, Director of the Princeton Survey Research Center to identify and examine ways to improve the CWS questions in order to increase validity, reduce measurement error, and determine if new or additional categories of alternative work are needed.

Research shows a shifting balance of gains and losses in cognitive abilities throughout adulthood, with increases in experience-based knowledge and decreases in the ability to process new information quickly and efficiently. However, as is the case with much psychological research, little is known about how these ability changes manifest in daily life, including in the workplace. This grant supports a project by psychologist Margie Lachman and economist Adam Jaffe to study creative output over the life course by augmenting and analyzing a large dataset of more than two million patent holders. Lachman and Jaffe will use the dataset to examine such questions as the extent to which individuals are able to maintain or increase the quality and quantity of their innovative work, whether this varies by sector or gender, and whether teams that bring older and younger workers together are less or more creative than teams that are less age-diverse. This research will result in new knowledge and important insights for economists, psychologists, and other social scientists who are interested in how aging-related cognitive changes can affect innovation across life trajectories and across different types of teams. The creation of the new database will also facilitate further research.