August 2018

Graying of U.S. Bankruptcy: Fallout from Life in a Risk Society

By Deborah Thorne (University of Idaho), Pamela Foohey (Indiana University Maurer School of Law), Robert M. Lawless (University of Illinois College of Law) & Katherine M. Porter (University of California - Irvine School of Law) The social safety net for older Americans has been shrinking for the past couple decades. The risks associated with aging, reduced income, and increased healthcare costs, have been off-loaded onto older individuals. At the same time, older Americans are increasingly likely to file consumer bankruptcy,...

Population Aging, Social Security and Fiscal Limits

By Burkhard Heer (University of Augsburg; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute)), Vito Polito (Cardiff Business School) & Michael Wickens (University of Cardiff; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute)) We study the sustainability of pension systems using a life-cycle model with distortionary taxation that sets an upper limit to the real value of tax revenues. This limit implies an endogenous threshold dependency ratio, i.e. a point...

Financial Fraud among Older Americans: Evidence and Implications

By Marguerite DeLiema, Martha Deevy, Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell The consequences of poor financial capability at older ages are serious and include making mistakes with credit, spending retirement assets too quickly, and being defrauded by financial predators. Because older persons are at or past the peak of their wealth accumulation, they are often the targets of fraud. Our project analyzes a module we developed and fielded in the 2016 Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Using this dataset, we evaluate...

Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: Working Longer

By Courtney Coile This is the introduction and summary to the eighth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. This project, which compares the experiences of a dozen developed countries, was launched in the mid 1990s following decades of decline in the labor force participation rate of older men. The first several phases of the project document that social security program provisions can create powerful incentives for retirement that are strongly correlated with...

Financial Incentives and Earnings of Disability Insurance Recipients: Evidence from a Notch Design

By Philippe Ruh Most countries reduce Disability Insurance (DI) benefits for beneficiaries earning above a specified threshold. Such an earnings threshold generates a discontinuous increase in tax liability—a notch—and creates an incentive to keep earnings below the threshold. Exploiting such a notch in Austria, we provide transparent and credible identification of the effect of financial incentives on DI beneficiaries’ earnings. Using rich administrative data, we document large and sharp bunching at the earnings threshold. However, the elasticity driving these responses...

The Power of Working Longer

By Gila Bronshtein This paper compares the relative strengths of working longer vs. saving more in terms of increasing a household’s affordable, sustainable standard of living in retirement. Both stylized households and actual households from the Health and Retirement Study are examined. We assume that workers commence Social Security benefits when they retire. The basic result is that delaying retirement by 3-6 months has the same impact on the retirement standard of living as saving an additional one-percentage point of...

July 2018

Aging in America: A Cultural History

By Lawrence R Samuel Aging is a preoccupation shared by beauty bloggers, serious journalists, scientists, doctors, celebrities--arguably all of adult America, given the pervasiveness of the crusade against it in popular culture and the media. We take our youth-oriented culture as a given but, as Lawrence R. Samuel argues, this was not always the case. Old age was revered in early America, in part because it was so rare. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s, according to Samuel, that...

The Winning Combination of Surviving Together: Poor and Their Resilience Built Through Relationships

By Arun Keshav (Amity University, Rajasthan) Social capital happens to be one of the most important assets that poor possess. It is this safety net on which they fall upon at time of crisis and also draw security to reduce their vulnerabilities to several risks but what strength lies behind this social capital? Why poor invest so much in their social relations? In this article the author tries to understand what lies behind these and the winning combination of surviving...

Retirement, Pensions and Justice: A Philosophical Analysis

By Mark Hyde &‎ Rory Shand This book addresses the tendency to mischaracterise liberalism as a “neoliberal” reform project, arguing that liberal political philosophy is concerned only to sustain the conditions that make individual freedom possible. This is illustrated with reference to the design of pensions. Considered in terms of liberal justice, retirement systems require redistributive transfers to help the poor, measures to ensure that retirees are rewarded on their merits, and provisions that treat everyone with equal dignity and...

Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare

By Dr. Parag Mahajan Md Do you want to know the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) & healthcare, & how AI is improving healthcare? Technology is evolving rapidly, & you need to keep up to stay at the top. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing all aspects of healthcare & this book is intended to be your companion on this journey. It’s a power-packed AI book that guides you about the current state and future applications of AI in healthcare, including those under development,...