This grant supports three, two-day, annual conferences exploring the latest economic research related to changing labor market institutions and regulatory policy in ways that accommodate the increasing lifespans of the American worker.   Hosted by economist John Shoven, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), the conferences will serve as an annual event where the growing community of new and established economists working on these issues can gather to network, share ideas, and learn about the latest research.  Topics to be discussed at the conferences will cover a wide range of issues, including retirement security, how existing regulatory regimes affect worker incentives, retirement strategies, pensions, the likely effects of proposed alternative regulatory regimes, and systematic differences between labor markets for older workers and those for younger cohorts.  Additional funds will support a small postdoc/first sabbatical fellowship program that will support the work of two researchers interested in conducting original, high-quality economic research in this area.

As the health of the U.S. population improves and the sources of retirement income become potentially more unstable, older Americans are expected to continue their current trend of both needing and wanting to work longer.  The health impacts of longer working lives, however, are inadequately understood, particularly when work is induced by policy changes such as increasing the age of full retirement for Social Security benefits. This grant supports research by Maria Fitzpatrick of Cornell University and Timothy Moore of George Washington University that examines this issue by studying the changes made in 1983 to the statutory retirement ages for Social Security benefits.  Combining administrative with data and detailed data on health behaviors and expenditures, Fitzpatrick and Moore will examine how and whether differences in the length of working lives change health outcomes such as mortality and morbidity.

Funds from this grant support efforts by the American Council on Education (ACE) to understand and increase the impact of the Sloan Awards for Retirement Transitions, a series of awards given to 15 U.S. colleges and universities to honor and accelerate innovative, effective policies for successfully managing the culminating stages of faculty careers. First, ACE will monitor the progress of the 15 retirement award winners. They will collect campus reports as to how innovative practices and programs have been embedded in campus culture so that faculty members feel free to use them and are satisfied with the outcome. Second, from this group of 15 winners, ACE will select five to six institutions that are ready and committed to take their programs to the next level of institutional transformation. Three, ACE will identify three or four institutions that were initially interested in competing for the awards, but because of timing or other issues on their campuses, reluctantly chose not to compete. ACE will work closely with these schools to achieve the institutional changes necessary to support faculty in their final career stage as they are transitioning to retirement. Knowledge gained from these activities will be used to mount a deep and widespread communication effort within higher education to educate other institutions about effective ways that universities and colleges can change their campus cultures in order to support senior faculty choosing to work longer, assist them in transitioning to an active next career phase, and promote culminating career legacies.

In 2012, the Trustees of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation approved a $3.2 million grant to the University of Texas to support a project to re-contact and survey the original, nationally representative High School and Beyond (HSB) 1980 sophomore class cohort in order to assess the effects of early-life human capital on later-life labor market, health, and family outcomes. This new data set will provide scholars with access to a wealth of data collected contemporaneously when the respondents were adolescents and young adults. These data include measures of cognitive and noncognitive skills, school performance, standardized test scores, family socioeconomic origins, health, early life careers, and family formation. The new dataset will enable scholars to study in previously unavailable detail the antecedents of later life labor market activities. This grant provides supplemental support to that project by creating a pool of funds for incentive payments for survey participants to ensure an 80 percent response rate.

Funds of this grant support a new program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to sponsor a postdoctoral research fellow in each of the next three academic years, beginning in 2014 to 2015, whose research will focus on the economics of the aging workforce. Each fellow will receive one year of support to carry out research at NBER’s offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as to participate in the NBER summer institute workshops on Aging and Labor Studies. Selection of the three fellows will be made by a panel of experts who are members of both the Aging and Labor Studies programs at NBER. The committee’s decisions will be based on an 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.

One difficulty in understanding the labor market behavior of older workers is that much of the needed data is not available. For instance, the National Institute on Aging’s Health and Retirement Survey—the gold standard data set for examining aging—does not collect detailed information about the pecuniary and nonpecuniary job characteristics of older workers. As such, trends in retirement and other labor market behaviors of older workers cannot be correlated with data about what their jobs are like. This grant provides support for a project by the Rand Corporation to correct this gap by collecting new data describing the actual and preferred working conditions of approximately 2,200 older Americans between the ages of 55 and 70 in the ongoing, nationally representative RAND American Life Panel (ALP). The new dataset will be made publicly available to the broader research community; will serve as encouragement to younger scholars to do research on aging and work; and will inform evidence-based conversations with the National Institute on Aging about adding items on the pecuniary and nonpecuniary attributes of work to the Health and Retirement Survey.

Funds from this grant support an innovative study by Harvard University that explores how colleges and universities can promote faculty diversity. Led by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev and utilizing an original institutional-individual database on 13,000 faculty at 1,000 institutions from 1993 to 2013, the project team will examine the effects of academic hiring, promotion, diversity and work-life policies, and implementation supports on overall faculty diversity; career progress of STEM faculty from all race/ethnic-by-gender groups; and faculty family formation. Additionally, the team will specifically evaluate the impact of the Sloan Awards for Faculty Career Flexibility on these outcomes, and on the spread of flexibility policies beyond awardees and applicants.