Tag: Great Depression
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…
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…
