This two-year grant supports a project by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) to enhance public understanding of the economic issues surrounding the older workforce. NORC will field a high-quality, nationally representative survey of older adults about the strategies they use when claiming Social Security benefits and distribute the results nationwide through a partnership with the Associated Press (AP). Survey reporting will be supplemented with reporting on new economic research about optimal retirement asset draw-down strategies and survey data will be made freely available to researchers in a public-use dataset. Additional funds from this grant will provide one year of salary support to a NORC-AP fellow who will cover the older workforce beat, producing thoughtful, 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 workforce on businesses, pensions, and government programs like Social Security.

Funds from this grant will support an initiative by the New York Academy of Medicine to design and launch an Age-Friendly Workplaces Award aimed at recognizing New York City employers with innovative hiring, employment, and retirement practices that maximize the potential of older workers. Employers from each of the city's five boroughs will be eligible, and winners will be selected by an independent panel of high profile business leaders. Grant funds will support awards for between five and ten New York City businesses from a diverse array of industries and sectors, a dedicated website that will describe the awards and allow businesses to share information about best workplace practices, a series of case studies that highlight specific strategies for tapping the potential of older workers, and a published Guide for Age-Friendly Employers that will summarize current findings on best older worker policies and practices. Additional funds will support a robust outreach and public relations efforts, and a public ceremony honoring the winners. The awards raise the visibility of older workers as active and productive members of the workforce and to engage the business community issues related to the older workforce through identifying best practices and local champions.

The grants funds a project by a team led by University of Michigan economist Matthew Shapiro, who will analyze an exciting new dataset to glean insights about the economic behavior of older Americans. Shapiro and his team will analyze member data provided by Pageonce, a firm that has developed a mobile phone app that lets users pay bills online as well as integrate disparate bank accounts, credit card balances, and investment accounts all in one place. Analyzing the Pageonce data, the team will focus on what it can tell us about how older workers spend and save, how they handle debt, and how saving and consumption decisions change after retirement.

Funds from this grant support the work of Nichole Maestas of the Rand Corporation, who is studying how changes in labor demand affects the employment outcomes of older workers. In earlier work, Maestas has catalogued how older workers often "unretire", re-entering the workforce after a previous exit. Some 60 percent of such workers who unretire end up changing occupations, moving from managerial and professional work to positions in sales, administration, and service provision, positions that are often part-time or offer more flexible scheduling opportunities. Maestas will look at existing datasets to understand the extent to which this phenomenon can be explained by changes in the labor demand for such positions, looking at how growth in industries with large proportions of sales, administrative or service jobs, and the subsequent increase in the demand for workers to fill these jobs, explains employment outcomes for older workers.