John W. R. Phillips

Cohort Profile: the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is a nationally representative longitudinal survey of more than 37 000 individuals over age 50 in 23 000 households in the USA. The survey, which has been fielded every 2 years since 1992, was established to provide a national resource for data on the changing health and economic circumstances associated with ageing at both individual and population levels. Its multidisciplinary approach is focused on four broad topics-income and wealth; health, cognition and use of healthcare services; work and retirement; and family connections. HRS data are also linked at the individual level to administrative records from Social Security and Medicare, Veterans Administration, the National Death Index and employer-provided pension plan information. Since 2006, data collection has expanded to include biomarkers and genetics as well as much greater depth in psychology and social context. This blend of economic, health and psychosocial information provides unprecedented potential to study increasingly complex questions about ageing and retirement. The HRS has been a leading force for rapid release of data while simultaneously protecting the confidentiality of respondents. Three categories of data-public, sensitive and restricted-can be accessed through procedures described on the HRS website (hrsonline.isr.umich.edu).

Social Security Replacement Rates for Alternative Earnings Benchmarks

Social Security reform proposals are often presented in terms of their differential impacts on hypothetical or ‘example’ workers. Our work explores how different benchmarks produce different replacement rate outcomes. We use the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to evaluate how Social Security benefit replacement rates differ for actual versus hypothetical earner profiles, and we examine whether these findings are sensitive to alternative definitions of replacement rates. We find that workers with the median HRS profile would be estimated to receive benefits worth 55% of lifetime average earnings, versus 48% for the SSA medium scaled profile. Since US policymakers tend to prefer a replacement rate measure tied to workers’ own past earnings, using these metrics would yield higher replacement rates compared to commonly used scaled illustrative profiles. However, benchmarks that use population as opposed to individual earnings measures to compare individual worker benefits to pre-retirement consumption produce lower replacement rates for HRS versus hypothetical earners.

Retirement Responses to Early Social Security Benefit Reductions

This paper evaluates potential responses to reductions in early Social Security retirement benefits. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) linked to administrative records, we find that Social Security coverage is quite uneven in the older population: one-quarter of respondents in their late 50s lacks coverage under the Disability Insurance program, and one-fifth lacks coverage for old-age benefits. Among those eligible for benefits, respondents who subsequently retired early appear quite similar initially to those who later filed for normal retirement benefits, but both groups were healthier and better educated than those who later filed for disability benefits. Next we investigate the potential impact of curtailing, and then eliminating, early Social Security benefits. A life-cycle model of retirement behavior provides estimated parameters used to simulate the effects of cutting early Social Security benefits on retirement pathways. We find that cutting early Social Security benefits would boost the probability of normal retirement by twice as much as it would the probability of disability retirement.

Modeling Lifetime Earnings Paths: Hypothetical versus Actual Workers

To assess the distributional effects of social security reform proposals, it is essential to have good information on real-world workers’ lifetime earnings trajectories. Until recently, however, policymakers have relied on hypothetical earnings profiles for policy analysis. We use actual lifetime earnings data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to compare actual workers’ covered earnings profiles to these hypothetical profiles. We show that the hypothetical profiles do not track earnings patterns of current retirees; thus lifetime pay levels are much higher than for most HRS workers. Therefore, using hypothetical profiles could misrepresent benefits paid and taxes collected under such reforms.

Retirement wealth and lifetime earnings variability

The past few decades have witnessed a global move towards private provision for retirement through individual defined contribution pensions at the expense of publicly provided and employer-sponsored defined benefit pensions. As a consequence, workers and retirees are becoming increasingly exposed to uncertainties in financial, labour and economic markets. The contributors to this book analyse the implications for retirement income policy, workers and retirees in view of the current climate of heightened exposure to scary markets. The implications of a broad range of scary market scenarios are presented, and novel solutions prescribed. Retirement incomes across a number of countries including the US, the UK, Japan and Australia are explored.

Saving Shortfalls and Delayed Retirement

Prior research has suggested that many older Americans have not saved enough to maintain consumption levels in old age. One way older persons might respond to inadequate savings would be to extend their worklives by delaying retirement. This paper examines evidence on this matter using the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative panel survey of people age 51-61 in 1992 followed for several years in a panel. We use the data to project household retirement assets and to determine how much more saving would be needed to preserve post-retirement consumption levels. Our research then examines the links between derived saving shortfall measures and delayed retirement patterns. Among nonmarried persons, there is evidence that larger shortfalls do produce delayed retirement, though the effect is not quantitatively large. For married couples, pre-retirement wealth shortfalls do not appear to be significantly associated with delayed retirement. Evidently couples have other means of handling saving shortfalls.

Lifetime Earnings Variability and Retirement Wealth

This paper explores how earnings variability is related to retirement wealth. Past research has demonstrated that the average American household on the verge of retirement would need to save substantially more, in order to preserve consumption flows in old age. While several socioeconomic factors have been examined that might explain such problems, prior studies have not assessed the role of earnings variability over the lifetime as a potential explanation for poor retirement prospects. Thus two workers having identical levels of average lifetime earnings might have had very different patterns of earnings variability over their lifetimes. Such differences could translate into quite different retirement wealth outcomes. This paper evaluates the effect of earnings variability on retirement wealth using information supplied by respondents to the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). This is a rich and nationally representative dataset on Americans on the verge of retirement, with responses linked to administrative records from the Social Security Administration. Our research illuminates the key links between lifetime earnings variability and retirement wealth.

Applications, Denials, and Appeals for Social Security Disability Insurance

This project explores the process by which older workers apply for, and are awarded, Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) benefits. Our focus is on how and whether DI serves as a path out of the labor market at older ages. This research is important to the extent that proposals to raise the early retirement age under Social Security alter the opportunity set available to older workers. Identifying the characteristics of older workers who apply for DI under current rules, those who are rejected after application, and those who then go on to appeal, can provide policymakers with insight regarding the potential well-being of the “at risk” population if the early retirement age were to rise. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study to compare older workers prior to application, and use these characteristics to predict future DI application and award patterns. The findings indicate that older people initially in poor health and with low economic status are more likely to apply for DI thereafter, as compared to those reporting no health problems and with more assets. Nevertheless few factors distinguish statistically between applicants awarded versus denied benefits, and between those who appeal rejected applications versus those who do not.

Retirement in Japan and the United States: Cross-National Comparisons Using the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR) and the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS)

Cross-national comparisons of data from developed countries offer useful insights into the retirement process and policy. Here we summarize findings for older persons age 50-70 using new microdata files collected by the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR) project, and we compare these with results in the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We examine the relative importance of health, wealth, family, and other factors in work and retirement at older ages cross-nationally. Though both countries have relatively high employment at older ages, the Japanese have longer life expectancy, higher levels of financial wealth, and a lower public pension eligibility age. Our analysis, the first to compare these two rich data sources, suggests two conclusions (subject to revision when data weights become available). First, older Americans differ in key ways from their Japanese counterparts, particularly along educational, health, and wealth dimensions. Second, in some cases, there is a distinctly different impact of these factors on labor force outcomes. Specifically, age, sex, education, and wealth influence behavior differently across the two countries, though being obese or having better mental acuity/financial literacy scores has no differential impact. Thus observed differences in work patterns between Americans and Japanese at older ages are attributable to some identifiable factors; moreover, the results can be used to project future responses to changes in education, age, health, and wealth in order to account for the large differences in older workers’ work patterns at older ages in Japan and the US.