This study investigates how unpaid eldercare impacts caregivers' work and financial security, highlighting that women and caregivers of color disproportionately bear these responsibilities. We find that in addition to shifting the costs to informal caregivers, this systemic reliance also excludes some individuals from necessary support. Using Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and linked American Time Use Survey (ATUS)-Current Population Survey (CPS) data, we analyze who needs, receives, or pays for eldercare, and how caregiving frequency affects employment. We find daily caregiving significantly reduces workforce participation by nearly 2 percentage points, worsening economic disparities for already vulnerable groups.

This study examines the dynamics of caregiving and its impact on labor market outcomes, with a focus on the often-overlooked segment of sandwich caregivers defined as individuals engaged in both childcare and adult care. Utilizing data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) spanning the years 2012 to 2022, our findings reveal significant trends: women of all ages are more likely than men to be sandwich caregivers, individuals with higher educational attainment tend to assume sandwich caregiving roles later in life, and black workers are more inclined to provide sandwich care at an earlier age. Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjustment (IPWRA) is used to estimate unbiased treatment effects while propensity score matching is utilized to model interactions between sandwich caregiving and gender. Results indicate that sandwich caregivers are 5.7 percent less likely to participate in the labor force and, for those employed, work 5 hours less per week compared to non-caregiving workers, with more pronounced effects on women. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the impacts of sandwich caregiving responsibilities on extensive and intensive margins, highlighting the need for policies that address the unique challenges faced by sandwich caregivers.

Unpaid caregivers provide essential support for older family members in the United States, often at significant personal and financial cost. With no universal infrastructure for long-term care, caregivers may turn to programs like Social Security for relief. Our mixed-methods study uses Health and Retirement Study data and in-depth interviews to explore how caregivers manage retirement and care responsibilities. Early findings point to a complicated picture, as caregivers piece together support from multiple sources. The United States needs federal investment in long-term care and caregiver supports to address this systemic issue.

The New York Retirement and Disability Research Center (RDRC) was one of two new RDRCs created by a cooperative agreement with the Social Security Administration in 2023. The center aimed to focus on structural health, wealth, and life course processes that yield both opportunities and social and economic stratification. Although the center was defunded in early 2025, its first year of work brought together public health professionals, demographers, sociologists, urban planners, economists, and gerontologists to study a breadth of populations using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This symposium presents a range of work that examines how people get by in the face of disability, disaster, and aging on a low income. Our first presentation employs a new poverty measure to illuminate the effects of homeownership, health and social insurance benefits, and other transfers (especially rental assistance) on poverty among older adults. Our second presentation investigates the work and income situations of older adults displaced by disasters. Our third presentation examines how Social Security disability decisions affect health insurance status, poverty, and out-of-pocket medical costs. Our final presentation is a qualitative study exploring the experience of formerly incarcerated older adults in applying for disability benefits. Findings from this symposium demonstrate the complexity of economic insecurity and highlight the role of public benefits in alleviating poverty among older adults.

Since 1992 wealth for the bottom 90 percent of households nearing retirement has fallen. The only source of wealth helping the bottom 90 percent is Social Security. Despite pro savings policies and generous tax breaks for savings, the share of the bottom 50 percent having any retirement account didn't change in 20 years - 46 percent in 1992 and 47 percent in 2016. Even the middle class suffered; the share of the next 40 percent with retirement savings fell from 85 percent in 1992 to a low of 71 percent in 2016. Housing ownership increased a bit for the bottom 50 percent but fell among the middle class and upper middle class. Home equity for the working and middle class fell. Using SCF and HRS data over 20 years, we find the bulk of working-class wealth is government social insurance. Economists should not exclude social insurance from wealth calculations. We find social insurance is the most important source of wealth for most families. Government policies and institutions have failed wealth building for most American households with workers.

Abstract Several studies have documented the increase in retirement since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. I contribute to this literature by answering two key questions that show the pandemic excess retirement is caused primarily by demand-side factors: first, using the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) data on employment and retirement of older workers and CPS’s panel structure, I explore if older workers left their jobs and the labor force voluntarily as a part of “the great resignation”. I find that very few workers quit their jobs voluntarily, and most retirements were preceded by involuntary job loss and unemployment. Second, using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) with its rich data on wealth, employment, and the special Covid-19 related questions included in 2020 HRS (Wave 15), I examine if older workers who experienced job loss during the pandemic retired because they were financially prepared for retirement. I find that among the small group of older workers who quit their jobs because of the pandemic, the majority did not have adequate retirement assets and their decision is more likely to be based on their health status and vulnerability during the pandemic.

This article documents risks and disparities among older workers in the labor force and in retirement preparedness and explores the links between labor market challenges facing older workers and retirement insecurity. The authors use survey data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to update and expand upon previous research on issues including retirement plan coverage and retirement account balances, as well as older workers’ labor force participation and employment, job quality, and job security. They show that while many older workers have little to nothing saved for retirement and cannot afford to retire, the advances in their employment prospects and job quality have been slow and unequal. Their findings reframe improving access to decent jobs as a complement to, rather than substitute for, retirement readiness.

AbstractUsing Health and Retirement Study data linked to summary plan descriptions and W-2s, this study reports trends in retirement wealth inequality of older employees 1992–2010. The study identifies and corrects methodological flaws in past research. Retirement wealth is highly unequally distributed; the top lifetime earnings quintile holds half of all retirement wealth, the bottom quintile, only 1%. The top earnings quintile fared better in 2010 than in 1992, whereas bottom-quintile earners fared worse. But retirement wealth inequality mainly reflects inequality within earnings quintiles, resulting from inadequate savings, not outsize accumulations. Systemic flaws reduce median retirement wealth by 84%

Analysts and representatives of the news media often get confused about American workers’ retirement plan coverage due to the complexities behind multiple data sources. Namely, differing methodologies used by each source report different results. This research note updates previous attempts1 to explain the data differences and reports trends between 2000 and 2020 in two measures of employer-sponsored retirement plan coverage: access rate (the share of workers who are offered a retirement plan at work and are eligible to participate in them) and participation rate (the share of all workers who are participating in retirement plans offered at work). We also break down retirement plan access and participation rates by race, gender, and socio-economic status to report disparities in coverage.

A popular cash transfer program credited with lifting millions out of poverty, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) also reduces wages for non-college educated workers, particularly older workers. Meanwhile, eligibility rules have long prevented most older workers from receiving EITC benefits at the same rate as their younger counterparts. Expanding EITC benefits permanently would offset some of these lost earnings and help stabilize older workers’ earnings. In 2021, Congress enacted a temporary EITC expansion—and our research shows that a permanently expanded EITC would benefit millions of older low-income workers.

An examination of the status of older workers in June of 2021 reveals three highlights: 1.) Retirement Boom: At least 1.7 million more older workers than expected retired due to the pandemic recession. (2.) Retirement Inequality: At earlier ages, vulnerable older workers retired sooner, while more privileged workers delayed retirement. The share of retired workers among adults aged 55-64 rose 5% for those without a college education but fell 4% for those with a college degree.(3.) Racial Inequality: Black workers without a college degree experienced the highest increase in the share who are retired before age 65. This rate rose 1.5 percentage points, from 16.4% to 17.9%, between 2019 and 2021.

An examination of the status of older workers in the fourth quarter of 2020 reveals three highlights: After a partial recovery between May and August of 2020, older workers’ labor force participation rate fell continuously, reaching its lowest point of the recession in January. Roughly 1.1 million older workers exited the workforce between August and January due to the pandemic recession; older workers’ unemployment rate fell in January 2020 by 0.7 percentage points but the decline was driven by unemployed workers leaving the labor force rather than finding jobs; and since October of 2020, the decline in employment for Black, Hispanic, and Asian older workers was more than twice that of white older workers. Policy recommendations include Congress facilitating older workers’ return to work with aggressive anti-age discrimination enforcement and expanded unemployment benefits. Congress must also lower the Medicare eligibility age to age 50 and make the program “first payer†to lower the cost of hiring older workers.

Social Security provides insurance against the risk of outliving one’s wealth that is valuable to low and high earners alike. Both low and high earners would benefit from Social Security expansion. We propose expanding Social Security by allowing workers to buy extra Social Security benefits. We propose defaulting workers into revenue neutral “Catch-Up” contributions. Starting at age 50, workers would contribute an additional 3.1% of salary. The typical worker would receive additional benefits of $226 a month at retirement.

Social Security benefits are progressive and offset the unequal distribution of retirement wealth generated by a broken employer-based retirement system. Though Social Security benefits keep retirees out of poverty, American workers still face a retirement income crisis. Policymakers need to strengthen and expand Social Security and mandate employer-sponsored retirement plans to ensure universal coverage and adequate retirement income.

An examination of the status of older workers in the second quarter of 2020 reveals two highlights: increased downward mobility at all earnings levels and middle earners being hit twice, sustaining both job loss and market loss. Policy recommendations include Congress discouraging early retirement withdrawals and increasing and extending unemployment benefits for older workers. The recession exposes the need for comprehensive reform: expanding Social Security and creating a public option retirement plan in the form of Guaranteed Retirement Accounts.

The COVID-19 recession increased the risks of job loss and getting sick on the job and worsened the inequality in the distribution of job safety among older workers. Older women workers and older Black workers are underrepresented in safe jobs and overrepresented in jobs at risk for job loss and illness.

Using data from the Survey for Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this study investigates the relationship between withdrawals from 401(k) and IRA accounts and household-level economic shocks such as job loss, job change, divorce, and the onset of poor health. Workers in low-wage households are more likely to withdraw from their accounts than those in middle and high-income households, in part because they are more likely to withdraw when they experience a shock and also experience more shocks. Shocks are associated with about 20% of all retirement account withdrawals and exacerbate pre-existing inequalities in financial preparation for retirement. TOPICS: Retirement, legal/regulatory/public policy

Summary: To finance the transition to low-carbon economies required to mitigate climate change, countries are increasingly using a combination of carbon pricing and green bonds. This paper studies the reasoning behind such policy mixes and the economic interaction effects that result from these different policy instruments. We model these interactions using an intertemporal model, related to Sachs (2015), which proposes a burden sharing between current and future generations. The issuance of green bonds helps to enable immediate investment in climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the bonds would be repaid by future generations in such a way that those who benefit from reduced future environmental damage share in the burden of financing mitigation efforts undertaken today. We examine the effects of combining green bonds and carbon pricing in a three-phase model. We are using a numerical solution procedure which allows for finite-horizon solutions and phase changes. We show that green bonds perform better when they are combined with carbon pricing. Our proposed policy option appears to be politically more feasible than a green transition based only on carbon pricing and is more prudent for debt sustainability than a green transition that relies overly on green bonds.

Most workers filling new jobs in the next decade will be older than age 55. Improving their pay is the most effective way to encourage work and to not lower their income. Cutting social insurance benefits to incent elders to work longer can force many of them to job-search in a hostile market. Also, the collateral damages of disability and morbidity, which could be caused by older people working to age 70, must be acknowledged. Work is good, and many Americans like it, but working in a job with the benefit of a secure pension is obviously preferable to taking a job offering decreased benefits.