| Do Older Workers Face Greater Risk of Displacement? |
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IB#53 IntroductionThe employment of older workers into their mid-60s will be critical to ensuring that they enjoy a secure retirement. Continued employment provides current income while working, avoids the actuarial reduction in Social Security benefits, allows 401(k) accumulations to increase, and shortens the period of retirement those assets must support. One of the risks threatening the ability to work to older ages is being “displaced,” with displacement defined as the elimination of the worker’s job due to a shift in the demand for labor. Displacement can easily throw 50-year-old workers off course, disrupt their retirement saving plans, and possibly lead to premature retirement... For full paper in PDF For related working paper Alicia H. Munnell is the Director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College (CRR) and the Peter F. Drucker Professor in Management Sciences at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. Steven Sass is Associate Director for Research, Mauricio Soto is a senior research associate, and Natalia Zhivan is a graduate research assistant at the CRR. This brief is adapted from a longer paper (Munnell, et al. 2006) that is available here. Robert Hutchens provided very useful comments on this paper. The authors would like to thank Madeline Zavodny for generously sharing her knowledge, experience, and files. They would also like to thank Francesca Golub-Sass and Jerilyn Libby for excellent research assistance and Kelly Haverstick for helping us untangle our equations. |