Research
Older Workers Claim Social Security While Working, Upending Beliefs About Raising the Retirement Age
Policy Note | Challenging the widespread assumption that people claim their retirement benefits only when they retire, more than one-fifth of older workers in the United States start claiming Social Security benefits as soon as they are eligible, even while working for pay. Low-income older workers are more than three times as likely as high-income workers to claim early, indicating a reliance on Social Security payments to supplement low wages. Those who claim before the full retirement age...
Policy Note | Unpaid care work — the vast majority of such work in the United States — is primarily shouldered by economically vulnerable people. The costs associated with unpaid care work compound existing economic insecurity, leading to higher rates of poverty in old age. It is essential to support informal caregivers by recognizing caregiving as work and expanding their access to social safety net programs and providing paid family care leave.
Policy Note | Up to 40 percent of middle-income workers are at risk of downward mobility into poverty or near-poverty in retirement because of an inefficient retirement system that disproportionately benefits those with high incomes. Universal retirement accounts and providing workers with more equitable and better targeted tax incentives are among the best methods to supplement Social Security and prevent downward mobility in retirement.
Research Note— SCEPA's research finds that a significant part of the retirement boom consists of those we would otherwise expect to be working, given their employment a year earlier.
Working Paper—This paper explores how Covid-19 affected the employment and retirement patterns of older workers, with special attention to the distribution of pandemic impacts on those 55 and older.
Working Paper—Lack of meaningful action to mitigate climate change will disproportionally impact the vulnerable, including children who are being sent into the labor force to make ends meet for poor households hit by climate shocks.
Brief— SCEPA's research finds nearly 1.5 million low-income older workers would benefit from an expansion of the popular Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program. The report—released by our Retirement Equity Lab (ReLab)—finds without expanding the EITC, the program actually lowers wages among non-educated workers, especially those over 55.
Working Paper—A group of professors, graduate students, and fellows at The New School for Social Research's Department of Economics assess economic research and teaching in the United States and identify three major barriers to the successful adoption of alternative economic theories in academia and the public discourse.
