Back to Work: Expectations and Realizations of Work after Retirement

This paper analyzes a puzzling aspect of retirement behavior known as Òunretirement,Ó in which retirees appear to reverse their retirement decisions and return to work. Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study, the author shows that nearly 50 percent of retirees follow a nontraditional retirement path that involves partial retirement or unretirement, and that 26 percent of retirees later unretire. She explores two possible explanations: 1) unretirement transitions are unexpected, resulting from failures in planning or financial shocks; and 2) unretirement transitions are anticipated prior to retirement, reflecting a more complex retirement process. She presents a theoretical model that illustrates how both unplanned and planned unretirement might arise in a life-cycle framework-the former via uncertainty in asset returns and medical expenses, and the latter through a phenomenon she calls Òburnout and recovery,Ó in which individuals systematically burn out on their career jobs, retire, then return to the labor force after a period of recovery. Using data on expectations and realizations of work during retirement, she shows that unretirement was anticipated for the vast majority (82 percent) of those returning to work, and is not a result of financial shocks, poor planning or low wealth accumulation. For the small minority who unexpectedly returned to work, the evidence points to preference shocks-that is, discovering retirement leisure less satisfying than expected. If anything, expectations err on the side of excessive pessimism about retirement rather than unwarranted optimism; this finding complements a growing literature on consumption behavior at retirement which has suggested that realized retirement turns out better than expected for most people.retirement, aging, expectations, employment

The Labor Supply Effects of Disability Insurance: Evidence from Automatic Conversion Using Administrative Data

We analyze a natural experiment generated by the interaction of the Social Security DI and OA programs at Full Retirement Age, when DI beneficiaries are automatically converted from the DI program to the OA retired worker program. At conversion benefit payments continue unchanged, however the DI program’s high implicit marginal tax rate on earnings is abruptly relaxed. We use administrative Social Security data for the universe of primary worker DI beneficiaries from the 1934-1942 birth cohorts observed in panel over the period of 1995-2008. Our estimates imply that the DI program depresses labor supply among even the oldest DI beneficiaries. In the context of the literature to date that has sought to establish an upper bound on the earnings losses caused by the presence of the DI program by using quasi-experimental variation occurring at the program entry margin, our use of quasi-experimental variation arising from the program exit margin, when individuals are already in their mid-60s and the dominant trend in labor force participation in the population at large is downward, suggests that our estimates are most appropriately viewed as a lower bound estimate of the residual work capacity of all beneficiaries.

Medical Expenditure Risk and Household Portfolio Choice

As health care costs continue to rise, medical expenses have become an increasingly important contributor to financial risk. Economic theory suggests that when background risk rises, individuals will reduce their exposure to other risks. This paper presents a test of this theory by examining the effect of medical expenditure risk on the willingness of elderly Medicare beneficiaries to hold risky assets. We measure exposure to medical expenditure risk by whether an individual is covered by supplemental insurance through Medigap, an employer, or a Medicare HMO. We account for the endogeneity of insurance choice by using county variation in Medigap prices and non-Medicare HMO market penetration. We find that having Medigap or an employer policy increases risky asset holding by 6 percentage points relative to those enrolled in only Medicare Parts A and B. HMO participation increases risky asset holding by 12 percentage points. Given that just 50 percent of our sample holds risky assets, these are economically sizable effects. It also suggests an important link between the availability and pricing of health insurance and the financial behavior of the elderly.

Does the Rise in the Full Retirement Age Encourage Disability Benefits Applications? Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

As the Social Security full retirement age rises, the relative generosity of Social Security retirement benefits compared to disability benefits is declining, raising the incentive for insured people to apply for disability benefits. After controlling for other differences in observable characteristics, such as life-time earnings, we find that an average four month increase in the FRA slightly increases the two-year DI application rate by 0.04-0.30 percentage points. The effect is greater among those with a work limiting health problem (0.22-0.89 percentage points).

Discouraged Workers? Job Search Outcomes of Older Workers

Many have suggested we adopt policies that explicitly encourage the elderly to work. Behind this suggestion is the assumption that if an older person desires a job, one will be found; however, little is known about the extent to which this is true, and in the Health and Retirement Study, many more respondents say they expect to work after retirement than actually undertake work. This raises an important question: To what extent can the elderly readily find suitable jobs? In the context of a theoretical job search model, we examine the decision to search for a job and the probability of transitioning to employment using a large sample of non-workers from the Health and Retirement Study. The effects of both supply-side factors (individual characteristics) and demand-side factors (local labor market conditions) are estimated. We find employment transition rates are relatively low for older searchers: only half of older searchers successfully attain jobs. We examine various explanations for this result, including variation in search intensity, reservation wages, and the possibility of intervening health shocks. We conclude that about 13% of older job searchers becomes a discouraged worker in the sense of being willing to work at the prevailing wage, but unable to find a job.

The Labor Supply Effects of Disability Insurance Work Disincentives: Evidence from the Automatic Conversion to Retirement Benefits at Full Retirement Age

The Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program imposes strong work restrictions on beneficiaries; however, the causal effect of the work disincentives on labor supply has been difficult to estimate. We take a new look at this question by exploiting the fact that DI benefits are payable only until full retirement age (FRA), at which point they are converted to retired worker benefits, and the program’s implicit high marginal tax rate on earnings is abruptly relaxed. Using a quasiexperimental research design, we examine whether the DI work disincentives are binding by comparing changes in labor force participation rates before and after the FRA for DI beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. We find a relative increase in labor force participation at FRA for DI beneficiaries of 10.4 percentage points, and argue that this is likely a lower bound estimate on the labor supply disincentive effects of the DI program.

Burnout and the Retirement Decision

We introduce the process of psychological burnout and recovery as an explanation for the phenomenon known as unretirement. We illustrate theoretically how predictable time variation in burnout could generate retirement and subsequent re-entry in a standard retirement model. We apply this model to the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study, presenting a novel measure of burnout, the Burnout EX3 Index. The index is correlated with different types of work stressors, and its time profile discriminates among different types of retirees. For example, prior to retirement, burnout rises steeply for future unretirees then falls rapidly after retirement; whereas burnout among future partial retirees is low and changes little over time. Using a series of econometric models derived from our theoretical model, we show that as burnout rises, retirement becomes more probable, and as burnout recedes following retirement, re-entry becomes more probable. While access to public and private pension benefits increases the likelihood of retirement for all retirees, pension accruals are least important for those who will later unretire, suggesting that unretirees are more willing to trade future gains in pension wealth for leisure than other retirees. Indeed, for this group, the effect of burnout dominates that of the net return to work.

Cohort Differences in Retirement Expectations and Realizations

This chapter compares retirement expectations, retirement patterns, and expectations of future work across different cohorts of the Health and Retirement Study, including the new cohort of Baby Boomers currently in their late 50’s. We find that the Boomers are more strongly attached to the labor force as they enter their retirement years than were earlier cohorts at the same age. Compared to the preceding birth cohort, they expect to retire nearly one year later, they are 14 percent more likely to expect to be working full-time at age 65, and they are 21 percent more likely to expect to work in the future if they are not currently working. We find that these differences are not entirely explained by cohort differences in socioeconomic status, pension incentives, demographics, or health. We conclude that the Baby Boomers may have stronger preferences for work than previous cohorts

Back to Work: Expectations and Realizations of Work After Retirement

This paper analyzes labor force re-entry after retirement in an effort to understand whether these “unretirement” transitions are largely unexpected (perhaps resulting from failures in planning or unexpected financial shocks) or planned (perhaps representing a more complex retirement process). Nearly one-half of retirees follow a nontraditional retirement path that involves partial retirement and/or unretirement, and the unretirement rate among those observed at least five years after their first retirement is 24 percent. The unretirement rate is even higher among those retiring at younger ages (as high as 36 percent among those retiring at ages 51-52). I find that unretirement was anticipated for all but nine percent of retirees. If anything, expectations err on the side of excessive pessimism about the future rather than unwarranted optimism. Unretirement appears to be qualitatively similar to partial retirement and there is some evidence of a substantial correlation in the post-retirement labor supply transitions of married couples.

Does Medicare Save Lives?

The health insurance characteristics of the population changes sharply at age 65 as most people become eligible for Medicare. But do these changes matter for health? We address this question using data on over 400,000 hospital admissions for people who are admitted through the emergency room for "non-deferrable" conditions -- diagnoses with the same daily admission rates on weekends and weekdays. Among this subset of patients there is no discernible rise in the number of admissions at age 65, suggesting that the severity of illness is similar for patients on either side of the Medicare threshold. The insurance characteristics of the two groups are much different, however, with a large jump at 65 in the fraction who have Medicare as their primary insurer, and a reduction in the fraction with no coverage. These changes are associated with significant increases in hospital list chargers, in the number of procedures performed in hospital, and in the rate that patients are transferred to other care units in the hospital. We estimate a nearly 1 percentage point drop in 7-day mortality for patients at age 65, implying that Medicare eligibility reduces the death rate of this severely ill patient group by 20 percent. The mortality gap persists for at least two years following the initial hospital admission.