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.
Paper | Recent controversies over the impact of an energy embargo on Russia triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine have focused on reducing dependence on fossil fuels and reorganizing energy supplies. This German- language paper presents a model-based econometric framework to estimate both the short-term effects of fossil energy shortages and long-term effects of different climate policy measures on individual sectors of the economy.
Paper | This paper models economic output jointly with health outcomes as they pertain to the COVID pandemic, finding that a continuously varying control (i.e. the lockdown intensity) fares better than sporadically taken discrete-time decisions with lockdown intensity staying constant over some time intervals.
This paper proposes a new type of tax to help finance (and accelerate) the green transition.
Article | Value capture schemes sound simple in theory – future revenues pay debt issued to cover upfront costs. But in practice, these financing mechanisms are highly complex and, as a result, can have unintended consequences on municipal finances. Research from SCEPA’s Critical Public Finance project published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) offers a new frame to evaluate TIF projects based on the tool’s potential to create, capture, & destroy value.
Article | This article contributes to the literature on monopsony models by moving away from their emphasis on exogenous factors—worker preferences, incomplete information, and barriers— and focusing on these factors as the main drivers of monopsony power. Employers have compelling profit reasons to create monopsony conditions and create labor market frictions.
