This grant supports efforts by economists Mark Duggan of Stanford University and Courtney Coile of Wellesley College to increase our understanding of how incentives created by public policy affect labor market behavior of older workers by examining changes to the Veterans Administration Disability Compensation (VA-DC) program. Their work seeks to exploit a “natural experiment” occasioned by a 2001 change in the VA-DC that increased the generosity of the program, particularly for veterans of the Vietnam War. Analyzing administrative data on enrollees both before and after the change in policy, Duggan and Coile will estimate the effect of VA-DC enrollment on older veterans’ labor market outcomes; determine how these effects vary with age, race, ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment, and health; explore the effect of VA-DC enrollment on spouses’ labor market outcomes; examine the effect on enrollment in other government programs and on enrollees’ health status and economic well-being; and investigate whether expansions in the program’s eligibility criteria increased the sensitivity of older veterans’ labor market outcomes to economic conditions.

New technologies in a workplace—new devices, new software systems, new production techniques—often require workers to acquire new skills. Workers who do not learn how to properly use these new technologies become less productive relative to workers who do and, in theory, less valuable to their employer. This grant funds work by Nicole Maestas of the RAND Corporation to examine how technological change affects the employment outcomes of older workers. Using a large dataset on German workers, Maestas and her team will analyze how technological innovations affect wage growth, employment status, and exit from the labor market among older workers; whether older workers are less likely than younger workers to receive training after innovation changes; and whether training can reduce or reverse the potential negative effects of innovation on the employment outcomes of older workers.

This grant supports an initiative by the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (HCPDS) to launch an interdisciplinary, postdoctoral training program, the Sloan Fellowship on Aging and Work, which will support leading young scholars who wish to use multidisciplinary approaches to study the social and economic challenges posed by the aging work force. Led by center director Lisa Berkman, the HCPDS fellowship program will support three postdoctoral fellows for two-year terms beginning in September 2016. Fellows will be selected through a competitive application process, with candidates evaluated based on a number of criteria, including the quality of past work, the strength of their proposed research plans, and their potential to integrate questions, approaches, or analysis from two or more disciplines, including epidemiology, economics, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology.

Funds from this grant provide continued support to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in its efforts to lead a network of top economists in the examination of issues related to aging and work and to the barriers to working longer. Led by economist David Wise, this network of scholars has substantial past and ongoing research expertise on health and health trends at older ages, population aging and its implications, the determinants of work and retirement, the incentives in public and employer policies, and the psychosocial factors that influence behavior. Grant funds will help NBER extend the network collaboration by producing at least nine papers focused on how to facilitate work at older ages. Additional topic areas to be addressed include work capacity at older ages; how public and employer benefit policies affect work and retirement; and factors that facilitate work by seniors, such as work environments and job flexibility.