Social Security's Delayed Retirement Credit and the Labor Supply of Older Men PDF Download

Author: Jonathan F. Pingle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Older men
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
This paper presents estimates of the impact of Social Security's Delayed Retirement Credit on the employment rates of older men. The credit raises lifetime social security benefit payments for recipients who delay receiving benefits after age 65 and offers a rare and important test of whether labor supply incentives built in to the program can promote work at older ages. The results suggest that the increased incentives raised employment among workers over age 65. In addition, the recent increases in social security's Normal Retirement Age also appear to be pushing up labor supply.

Author: Bo MacInnis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Using data from the Current Population Surveys, we find an increase in the fraction of older American men who worked without receiving Social Security retirement benefits and a decline in the fraction of men who claimed benefits without working during the period 1980-2006. Using bivariate probit regressions, we find that an increase in Social Security's normal retirement age decreased labor force participation rate regardless of benefits receipt status; that an increase in the delayed retirement credit increased benefit receipt regardless of labor force status; and that labor force participation and claiming Social Security benefits are strongly and negatively correlated.

Author: Cordelia W. Reimers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The labor supply response to critical aspects of the Social Security program depends on whether behavior is "myopic" (conditioned by current benefits only) or "far-sighted" (conditioned by the entire future benefit stream). This behavior reflects attitudes toward risk and ability to borrow, as well as underlying time preferences. The individual's effective time horizon is treated as an empirical question in this paper. Responses to the Social Security earnings test and the delayed retirement credit are examined, as well as the question of whether older men and women are able to work while keeping their earnings below the exempt earnings limit; in other words, whether the earnings test affects participation as well as hours of work. Hazard functions for labor market reentry after retirement are estimated using the Longitudinal Retirement History Study. We find striking gender differences in that women respond to Social Security wealth and are not deterred from working by the earnings test, while men respond to current benefits and their labor force participation is impeded by the test. Increases in the delayed retirement credit, as provided by the 1983 amendments to the Social Security Act, should therefore increase the labor supply of older women but not of men, though its intention was to increase the supply of both; however, increasing or abolishing the earnings limit, as proposed in Congress, would increase older men's participation but not that of older women.

Author: Thomas L. Steinmeier
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A structural life-cycle retirement model with an improved specification over previous models is used to analyze and compare the long-run labor supply effects of the rules for Social Security in place in 1972,1977 and 1983, and for an actuarially fair system. The effects of separate provisions from the 1983 amendments are examined. These include the raising of the normal retirement age to 67, the increase in the delayed retirement credit to 8 percent, and the lowering of the reduction rate for earnings over the test amount to one dollar for every three dollars of earnings

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309261961
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The United States is in the midst of a major demographic shift. In the coming decades, people aged 65 and over will make up an increasingly large percentage of the population: The ratio of people aged 65+ to people aged 20-64 will rise by 80%. This shift is happening for two reasons: people are living longer, and many couples are choosing to have fewer children and to have those children somewhat later in life. The resulting demographic shift will present the nation with economic challenges, both to absorb the costs and to leverage the benefits of an aging population. Aging and the Macroeconomy: Long-Term Implications of an Older Population presents the fundamental factors driving the aging of the U.S. population, as well as its societal implications and likely long-term macroeconomic effects in a global context. The report finds that, while population aging does not pose an insurmountable challenge to the nation, it is imperative that sensible policies are implemented soon to allow companies and households to respond. It offers four practical approaches for preparing resources to support the future consumption of households and for adapting to the new economic landscape.

Author: Roger Hall Gordon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Income tax
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
Many provisions of the Social Security Program distort an individual's labor supply incentives. In particular, the payroll tax, the earnings test, the offsetting actuarial adjustment, and the dependence of the size of future benefits on the level of current earnings all affect the net return to extra work. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the size of the net tax rate on labor income in a variety of circumstances, taking into account all these provisions, as well as the personal income tax. We find that the Social Security Program on net in the past has provided a large subsidy to labor supply, which for many people effectively offset the personal income tax. This subsidy rate, however, has been declining steadily over time.

Author: Itay Saporta-Eksten
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor supply
Languages : en
Pages : 49

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Book Description
We study the effects of public pension systems on the retirement timing of older workers and, in turn, the health consequences of delaying retirement by those workers. Causal inference relies on a social security reform in Israel that shifted payments from husbands to their (non-working) wives, thereby substantially reducing the implied tax on the husband's employment while keeping overall household wealth constant. Using administrative social security data, we estimate extensive-margin labor supply elasticities w.r.t. the average net-of-tax rate of about 0.43 for men over 65. Using the reform to instrument for employment, we find that working an additional full year at old age decreases longevity. This mortality effect occurs after age 75 and is driven by workers holding blue-collar jobs. Finally, we evaluate the effect of the reform on earnings. The results imply a small value for an additional year of life, suggesting that workers underestimate the health cost of employment at older ages.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social security
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Author: Philip Armour
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
This paper examines how older workers adjust their labor supply in response to information they receive about their retirement wealth from the provision of the Social Security Statement. We find that older male workers' labor supply is highly responsive to receiving personalized information about future Social Security benefits, leading to a reduction of 119 hours worked per year, on average. However, our estimates point to significant heterogeneity in this response, with workers at the lower end of the hours-worked distribution increasing their labor supply and those at the high end decreasing their labor supply. We argue differences in knowledge about Social Security benefits across the labor supply distribution can explain much of this heterogeneity. We additionally explore the extent to which the information on the Statement may have led some workers to mistakenly reduce their labor supply by too much due to a lack of understanding of the dynamic nature of the Statement's benefit projections with respect to earnings. Receipt of a second Statement led all but the lowest hour workers to increase their labor supply relative to workers who did not receive a second Statement. This is consistent with workers misunderstanding the information provided as accumulated rather than projected wealth. Our results point to older workers being very responsive to Social Security information, which highlights the need to accurately convey information about both pension wealth and its sensitivity to changes in earnings.

Author: Jeffrey B. Liebman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor supply
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
The degree to which the Social Security tax distorts labor supply depends on the extent to which individuals perceive the link between current earnings and future Social Security benefits. Some Social Security reform plans have been motivated by an assumption that workers fail to perceive this link and that increasing the salience of the link could result in significant efficiency gains. To measure the perceived linkage between labor supply and Social Security benefits, we administered a survey to a representative sample of Americans aged 50-70. We find that the majority of respondents believe that their Social Security benefits increase with labor supply. Indeed, respondents generally report a link between labor supply and future benefits that is somewhat greater than the actual incentive. We also surveyed people about their understanding of various other provisions in the Social Security benefit rules. We find that some of these provisions (e.g., effects of delayed benefit claiming and rules on widow benefits) are relatively well understood while others (e.g., rules on spousal benefits, provisions on which years of earnings are taken into account) are less well understood. In addition, our survey incorporated a framing experiment, which shows that how the incentives for delayed claiming are presented has an impact on hypothetical claiming decisions. In particular, the traditional "break-even" framing used by the Social Security Administration leads to earlier claiming than other presentations do.