Dart board arrows missed target on wood wall

The National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI) measures the percentage of working-age households that is at risk of being financially unprepared for retirement.  Since the Great Recession, the calculations show that even if households work to age 65 and annuitize all their financial assets, including the receipts from reverse mortgages on their homes, roughly half of…

man holding stethoscope with piggy bank

The headlines from the 2023 Medicare Trustees Re­port were that the Hospital Insurance (HI) program faces a long-term deficit and will deplete its trust fund reserves in 2031 and that the rest of the Medicare program will require increasing amounts of general revenues. While true, the outlook for program costs is considerably more favorable than…

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In 2015, the number of individuals receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) benefits began to drop for the first time in two decades.  This drop was caused by a wave of terminations, as beneficiaries aged into the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program, combined with a steep decline in the incidence rate (the number of…

We provide new evidence of forward-looking labor supply responses to changes in pension wealth.  We exploit a 2014 German reform that increased pension wealth for mothers by an average of 4.4 percent per child born before January 1992.  Using administrative data on the universe of working histories, we implement a difference-in-differences design comparing women who…

Homeownership is one of the largest sources of retirement wealth for most households and is promoted as a key tool for wealth accumulation.  However, a long history of discrimination in the housing market has constrained the ability of Black households to accumulate housing wealth relative to their White counterparts. Consequently, Black households approaching retirement…

home caregiver

The seemingly random patterns in low-paid and middle-class workers’ struggles are assembled into a cohesive narrative supplied by people who...

Business briefcase, stethoscope and financial market charts

This year I, with my sidekick Michael Wicklein, took a more-careful-than-usual look at the Trustees Report for the Medicare program....

CRR IN THE NEWS

Illustration of the 2021 federal stimulus check from the IRS with cash and social security card

Millions of Americans will probably get their Social Security checks even if Congress fails to reach a deal to raise the U.S. debt limit, economists and policy advocates say. 

Mortgage and loan rejected concept: paper house on a coin pile

In late 2019, Molly Stuart’s contract ended at the community college where she worked. “Normally, I’d just get a new job, but then Covid happened,” she said. So she collected unemployment for awhile, then retired.