Growing Disparities in Life Expectancy

[Excerpt] In a continuation of long-term trends, life expectancy has been steadily increasing in the United States for the past several decades. Accompanying the recent increases, however, is a growing disparity in life expectancy between individuals with high and low income and between those with more and less education. The difference in life expectancy across socioeconomic groups is significantly larger now than in 1980 or 1990. A similar trend is evident in Great Britain but not in Canada, where the gap in life expectancy between high- and low-income individuals has declined. Increasing longevity, by itself, has clear implications for Social Security and Medicare expenditures. As beneficiaries live longer, they will receive benefits for a longer period, putting additional pressure on the programs’ finances. The implications of a continued widening of the gap in life expectancy by socioeconomic status are clear for Social Security but less so for Medicare. For Social Security, a widening gap would worsen the long-term shortfall in financing and reduce the program’s progressivity — the extent to which it redistributes resources from high-income to low-income beneficiaries on a lifetime basis. For Medicare, it is not clear whether a widening gap would exacerbate the cost increases that will result from increasing longevity. How the share of Medicare spending on low-income individuals would change depends on how the percentage change in life expectancy at age 65 compares for the various groups of beneficiaries

Second Mortgages and Household Saving

Second mortgages accounted for 10.8% of the stock of outstanding mortgage debt at the end of 1987, up from 3.6% at the beginning of the 198Os. This paper investigates the determinants of second mortgage borrowing and the characteristics of second mortgage borrowers. We first calculate the outstanding stock of home equity that remains to be borrowed against on tax-preferred terms, recognizing the limits on interest deductions in the 1986 Tax Reform Act and the 1987 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. Despite these limits, we estimate that more than two trillion dollars of housing equity remains to be borrowed against by current homeowners. We then present cross-sectional evidence suggesting that households who obtain second mortgages after purchasing a home ace less wealthy than other households with similar characteristics. Each dollar of second mortgage borrowing is associated with a seventy-five cent reduction in household net worth. While these results cannot be given a causal interpretation, they are consistent with the view that increased access to second mortgages has reduced personal saving.

Baby Boomers vs Their Parents: Economic Well-being and Health Status

In this chapter, we use the Social Security Administration’s simulation model known as MINT (Modeling Income in the Near Term) to examine the projected health and economic status of Baby Boomers and their parents during retirement. Our projections indicate that boomers will enjoy higher levels of economic well-being and health than their parents, yet the distribution of income and wealth is more unequal among Boomers. For example, the ratio of income to poverty-level income grows three times faster at the 90th percentile than at the 10th percentile. Health problems are concentrated among persons of lower economic status in both generations, but the degree of concentration does not increase across generations

The Employment Effects of Social Security Disability Insurance in the Past 25 Years

We use administrative longitudinal data on earnings, impairment, and mortality to replicate and extend Bound's seminal study of rejected applicants to federal Disability Insurance (DI). We confirm Bound's main result that rejected older male applicants do not exhibit substantial labor force participation. We show this result is stable over time, robust to more narrow control groups, and similar within gender, impairment, industry, and earnings groups. However, we also find that younger rejected applicants have substantial employment after application. To what extent this translates into potential employment for new beneficiaries depends on which group among them is considered "on the margin" of receiving DI. If we use initially rejected applicants -- a large and growing fraction of new beneficiaries -- the resulting counterfactual employment rate for younger applicants is low, too. We also find that rejected applicants bear signs of economically induced applicants. DI appears to induce a growing number of less successful workers to apply, an important fraction of which ends up without benefits and non-employed

Long-Term Earnings Losses Due to Job Separation During the 1982 Recession

We present new estimates of the long-run earnings consequences of job separations that occurred during the 1982 recession based on a representative sample of workers drawn from Social Security administrative earnings data ranging from 1974 to 2005. Workers permanently leaving their long-term employer in the period from 1980 to 1985 experienced large and persistent earnings reductions lasting 15 to 20 years compared to workers of similar age and earnings potential who did not leave their employer. Earnings losses last up to 15 years even for workers displaced in better economic times or after shorter job tenure. These losses arise both due to reductions in employment as well as to reductions in annual earnings for those working. These preliminary estimates appear to confirm results from single U.S. states or limited time periods suggesting that job loss can be very costly for affected workers

Cosmos 2044

The effects of microgravity and hind limb suspension on the enzyme patterns are assessed within a slow twitch muscle (soleus) and a fast twitch muscle (tibialis anterior). Studies were made on 95 soleus fibers and about 300 tibialis anterior (TA) fibers. Over 2200 individual enzyme measurements were made. Six key metabolic enzymes (hexokinase, pyruvate kinease, citrate kinase, beta-hydroxyacyl CoA dehydrogenase, glucose-6-P dehydrogenase, and aspartate aminotransferase) plus glutaminase and glutamate decarboxylase, as well as glutamate, aspartate, and GABA, were measured in 11 regions of the hippocampal formation of synchronous, flight, and tail suspension rats. Major differences were observed in the normal distribution of each enzyme and amine acid, but no substantive effects of either microgravity or tail suspension on these patterns were clearly demonstrated