In this article, we combine the extensive literature on the analysis of life-course trajectories as sequences with the literature on causal inference and propose a new matching approach to investigate the causal effect of the timing of life-course events on subsequent outcomes. Our matching approach takes into account pre-event confounders that…

Growing life expectancy and changes in financial, marriage and labour markets have placed the income position of the elderly at the center of scientific and political discourse. As a consequence, the last decades witnessed the publication of various influential reports that contained comparative statistics on old age income inequalities on the…

This report examines how the two global mega-trends of population ageing and rising inequalities have been developing and interacting, both within and across generations. Taking a life-course perspective the report shows how inequalities in education, health, employment and earnings compound, resulting in large differences in lifetime earnings…

Economists have long suggested that higher private pension benefits "crowd out" other sources of household wealth accumulation. We exploit detailed information on pensions and lifetime earnings for older workers in the 1992 wave of the Health and Retirement Study and employ an instrumental-variable (IV) identification strategy to estimate…

Purpose: As part of an ongoing effort to analyze the distributional implications of potential policy reforms to the U.S. Social Security system, we consider the widely discussed reform of earnings sharing. Such an approach has been viewed as a way to "update" Social Security's family benefits based on marital status and as a means to…

China's oldest old population is estimated to quadruple by 2050. Yet, poverty rate for the oldest old has been the highest among all age groups in China. This paper investigates the relationship between economic stress, quality of life, and mortality among the oldest-old in China. Both objective economic hardships and perceived economic strain are…

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…

Current policies concerning income in old age are framed in terms of important Social Security and private pension developments. Criticisms of the "new Social Security" are viewed in the context of major problems associated with the options, especially private pensions. (Author)

Examines responsiveness of the nominal income of older persons to price changes and compares changes in their real income to trends in real income of other groups. Data from the Retirement History Study show the elderlys' income sources were not fixed in nominal terms, but increased as prices rose. (NRB)

Reports on discussions of 30 United States and Canadian experts at a meeting on policies and problems concerning midlife and older women. Discussion focused on income security and long-term care. Includes future prospects. (CH)

Cross-sectional data on Canadians born 1924-1928 indicate that from ages 50-64, those who had early socioeconomic advantages improve absolute and relative income compared with others in the cohort. At ages 65-74, economic well-being of the advantaged and disadvantaged converges. Canada's pension systems seem to counter status effects. (Contains 25…

In 1990, older Americans, especially those aged 65 to 74, had higher preretirement and pension earnings compared with their 1980 counterparts. (Author)

This document contains 4 charts and 15 tables describing the pension coverage of workers and the income of retirees in the United States as of 1984. Data were gathered through the fourth wave topical module to the 1984 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, conducted from September through December of 1984. The prevalence of…

Examines the risk of poverty among a sample of elderly couples and widows interviewed over a 10-year period. When individual movements into and out of poverty over time are identified, the risk of becoming poor is more than double the highest annual risk among couples, and is raised by almost 30 percent for widows. (Author/ABB)

Empirical evidence of tax shelter usage is sparse. These data add weight to earlier concerns about whether tax incentives to save for retirement benefit upper-income groups more than middle- and lower-income groups and present the importance of different sources of income in providing retirement funds for this group. (Author/RC)