After a long decline, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of older men in the United States leveled off in the 1980s, and began to increase in the late 1990s. We examine how changes in Social Security rules affected these trends. We attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s-80s to the increasing generosity of Social…

The passage of the Contract with America Advancement Act terminated the Social Security Administrations Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income benefits for persons diagnosed with drug or alcohol addiction (also known as DA&A recipients), effective January 1, 1997. From an evaluation standpoint, the law created the opportunity…

Data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation were matched with longitudinal earnings histories and Social Security benefit data to estimate joint work and benefit receipt choices for people age 62 and older. The probability of working is shown to depend on worker characteristics and policy variables. (Author)

Social Security earnings tests do not deter women from working, whereas men respond to current benefits and their labor force participation is inhibited by the tests. Increases in the delayed retirement benefit increased the labor supply of older women, but not older men. (SK)

Analysis of Current Population Survey and Social Security data through 1985 did not support hypothesis that increase in median earnings of Black men after 1964 reflects labor force withdrawal of large numbers of low-income Black men who received government transfers. Of the total gain in relative earnings from 1964-85, only 14 percent can be…

Purpose: This article investigates how older Americans leave their career jobs and estimates the extent of intermediate labor force activity (bridge jobs) between full-time work on a career job and complete labor-force withdrawal. Design and Methods: Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we explored the work histories and retirement…

The Panel on Manpower Training Evaluation has recommended that Social Security earnings data be more widely used in evaluating manpower programs, especially those that tend to serve prime-age males, such as the MDTA (Manpower Development Training Act) or NAB-JOBS (National Association of Businessmen-Job Opportunities in the Business Sector)…

Using a time series analysis to test the net empirical importance of the substitution and wealth effects associated with social security on the market of work of younger men, it was found that hours per week worked would have fallen off since 1936 without the present social security system. (Author)

The authors show that Canada's demographic situation in the future will differ substantially from what has been known in the past. Their analysis suggests that up to about 2010 population change will have less of an impact on the real level of aggregate government expenditures than on the size of the real gross national product. (Author/CT)