Matthew Shapiro and a research team at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley have successfully completed an innovative, two-year data infrastructure pilot that lays the groundwork for providing invaluable data regarding the real-time financial activities of older Americans as they work, transition into, and complete retirement. The Michigan/Berkeley team relied on data from a mobile payments application, Check (previously known as Pageonce) that integrates individuals’ bank accounts, credit cards, and asset accounts. With this data, the research team developed a data infrastructure that can be used to study individual income paths, consumption patterns, wealth levels, and financial portfolio choices of Americans, with a specific focus in this study on older Americans, more than 40,000 of which are Check users.  Funds from this grant provide continued support for the project, allowing the team to move from pilot to production of the data infrastructure and maintain a panel dataset of the work, income, spending, and balance sheet of a population of approximately one million users.  Subsequent analyses will allow the research team to examine behavior of older Americans as they face labor market transitions, health shocks, and the take up of Social Security; produce time series estimates of income and spending for novel aggregates including, for example, spending and income by age and type; and study the quality of financial decisions among older populations and of behavioral reactions to discrete financial events like income tax refunds. The team has instituted numerous safeguards to ensure the confidentiality and privacy of individual consumer data are strictly protected.

Recent Sloan-funded work by economist John Shoven of Stanford University demonstrates that, under a wide range of circumstances, healthy Americans would benefit from delaying the age at which they begin taking Social Security benefits.  This grant funds a wide-ranging education campaign by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) to effectively communicate Shoven’s research to the public. Building on its successful, user-friendly toolkit of materials, “Social Security: It Pays to Wait,” NASI will engage in an ambitious campaign to disseminate the toolkit through a multipronged media strategy that will utilize a grassroots outreach campaign composed of a number of well-connected partner organizations, including the Center for Rural Strategies, the National Women’s Law Center, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Urban League.  Grant funds will be used for dissemination, for efforts to deepen NASI’s connections with organizations well positioned to reach older workers, and for improvements to the toolkit based on user feedback.

This grant funds a project by economist Susan Rohwedder of the RAND Corporation to examine the psychological factors in individuals’ planning and subsequent decisions about the timing and staging of their decisions to work beyond conventional retirement age and how and when to transition from work to retirement.  Rohwedder and her team will investigate whether and to what extent psychological factors such as cognitive abilities, beliefs about the future, and personality explain differences in individuals’ staging and timing of late-in-life work decisions and subsequent retirement. While psychological factors have been shown to play an important role in various domains of individual decision-making, they have received little attention so far in the context of the complex decisions involved in late-in-life work choices and retirement transitions. Bringing together a cross-disciplinary team with expertise in cognitive psychology and classical and behavioral economics, they hope to fill this gap.

This grant provides two years 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 critical social issues. Funds from this grant will provide two years of salary support to a NORC-AP fellow who will cover the older work force beat, producing thoughtful, scientifically informed, high-quality articles on a variety of issues, including aging and work, retirement, flexible work arrangements for older workers, productivity, 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 to Alicia Munnell and her colleagues at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College supports research on the aging work force through the lens of workers’ socio-economic status (SES).  Munnell and her team will launch five integrated projects related to retirement, financial security, and employment opportunities that address the following questions.   How long do people need to work to achieve a financially secure retirement? How would retirement ages vary if they reflected differential mortality by socio-economic status? How does job-changing affect the ability to retire securely? How do job opportunities narrow with age? How much would reducing the price of older workers’ labor increase their attractiveness to employers? The project promises fill significant gaps in our understanding of the older work force.

This grant provides continued support for the second year of the Age Smart Employer Awards, which honor local New York City employers who have demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to leveraging older workers’ talent while meeting the goals of both the business and its employees.   Grant funds will support the administration of the awards, the selection process, and outreach activities.  Particular emphasis will be placed on expanding the circle of businesses that know about and apply for the awards as well as increasing the visibility for winning employers and the innovative practices for which they are being honored.  Outreach strategy will particularly target small businesses (those employing fewer than 100 workers) and employers in New York City’s growing health care sector.