This grant to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) supports the research, production, and dissemination of a consensus study, Understanding the Aging Workforce and Employment at Older Ages. Conducted by the National AcademiesХ Committee on Population (CPOP) in collaboration with the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, the NAS will convene a multidisciplinary committee of nine experts from economics, sociology, demography, organizational psychology, and statistics/methodology, who will meet over the course of four meetings and 18 months to produce their final consensus report. The committee will review and assess the existing research and data on the labor market activities of older workers, including individual-level human capital and demographic characteristics associated with decisions to continue working at older agesСwork history, occupation, cognitive abilities, financial literacy, and financial resourcesСas well as the social and structural factors that inhibit or enable employment, such as economic insecurity, family structure, workplace and personnel practices, policy levers, and available opportunities for self-employment. The report will then lay out conclusions and recommendations for future work by researchers, policymakers, and funding organizations and will be disseminated to key stakeholders, including relevant federal funding agencies, Congressional staff, academic researchers, and media.

This grant provides four years of continued funding for postdoctoral fellowships, for junior scholars to work on the labor market consequences of the aging of the U.S. workforce. Awarded through a competitive process, each fellowship will run for one year under the supervision of senior scholars in NBERХs well-regarded Economics of Aging or Labor Studies programs. Fellowships will be awarded on the basis of a candidateХs potential to make an important contribution to our understanding of labor markets for older workers. Additional monies will support a small competitive grants program, run by Alexander Gelber, associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, department of economics and School of Global Policy and Strategy, and RFPs for small economic research projects on issues related to the aging workforce. Over the course of the four-year grant, six projects will be funded on topics that include the determinants of work at older ages, age discrimination, productivity effects of an aging workforce, or how differences in workplace policies, training, and structure affect older workers.

Many older Americans are both healthy enough to work past conventional retirement age and want or need to stay in the labor market. But do employers need and want older workers? This grant to the Center on Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College aims to produce an enhanced understanding of the extent to which employers are ready and willing to hire and retain older workers. The CRR initiative will involve four separate, but integrated research projects. First, the CRR team will survey a large sample of employers to acquire their perceptions of the productivity and costs of their older workers relative to their younger ones. Second, they will analyze a large proprietary dataset provided by RetirementJobs.com, a nationally recognized job site for workers over the age of 50, and analyze the sorts of jobs being offered to workers on the site. Third, they will use multiple data sources to construct an index that ranks occupations by how easy it is for older workers to stay working or be hired into that occupation. Fourth, they will use data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Survey (LEHD), the Census Business Register (CBR), and the Longitudinal Business Register (LBR) to compare quantitative measures of worker value—the actual productivity (revenue per worker) and profitability (revenue divided by wages)—at firms based on the age distribution of their employees.

This grant supports a project by the Urban Institute, in partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, to harness the rich research findings from the Foundation’s Working Longer program to stimulate a meaningful, nonpartisan, fact-based policy discussion on older workers and retirement security. Urban Institute will not make specific policy recommendations, but instead will use Foundation-supported research to identify challenges and impediments to working past conventional retirement age and discuss how various policy reforms might both facilitate work at older ages and improve retirement income security. Supported activities include conducting a systemic review of findings of Sloan-supported articles, reports, and books on working longer; writing a synthesis report describing the policy implications of those findings; holding an expert roundtable to assess the merits of various reform options; conducting original policy analyses of the likely impacts of promising but understudied policy options that might facilitate work at older ages; producing and disseminating briefs, blog posts, and fact sheets that highlight the most promising reform proposals; and holding a series of public forums to engage federal and state policymakers.

While some evidence exists about the types of job conditions that could encourage older workers to remain in the labor force, it is unknown whether and the extent to which those conditions are or could be available in the labor market. Surveys of older workers, for instance, regularly report high demand for workplace flexibility—specifically hours flexibility—as well as other conditions. Yet, employee preferences for job conditions like these are only half of the labor market equation. Substantially less research has been done on the employer side of the equation to understand firm-level incentives and capabilities. This grant funds a project by Jeffrey Wenger and David Powell at the RAND Corporation, in collaboration with a team at the Indeed Hiring Lab that will survey human resource (HR) professionals, hiring managers, and employers to collect information about firms’ working conditions, the variation in those working conditions across workers in the same firm, and the varying on-the-job amenities from which workers can select. In addition to collecting and analyzing these data, the team will construct a set of vignettes that display the tradeoffs between job conditions and wages that firms are capable of and willing to make. This project will produce some of the first evidence about firm-level behavior regarding the willingness of employers to accommodate older workers with specific work conditions.