Tag: Great Depression

Smiling woman eating green apple.

Abstract We show that earnings over the life cycle and health and productivity around retirement age vary with exposure to economic conditions in early life. Using state-year-level variation from the most severe and prolonged economic downturn in American history – the Great Depression – combined with restricted microdata from the Health and Retirement Study, w…

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Introduction The U.S. retirement income system has two main components — Social Security and publicly subsidized and regulated employer plans. The federal government created Social Security in the Great Depression, when the problem of old-age poverty was especially severe. Social Security is an employment-based social insurance program that assures older workers a basic replacement incom…