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Overtime
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America’s Aging Workforce and
the Future of Working Longer
edited by
Lisa F. Berkman
and
Beth C. Truesdale
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197512067.001.0001
This material is not intended to be, and should not be considered, a substitute for medical or other professional
advice. Treatment for the conditions described in this material is highly dependent on the individual
circumstances. And, while this material is designed to offer accurate information with respect to the subject
matter covered and to be current as of the time it was written, research and knowledge about medical and health
issues is constantly evolving and dose schedules for medications are being revised continually, with new side
effects recognized and accounted for regularly. Readers must therefore always check the product information
and clinical procedures with the most up-to-date published product information and data sheets provided by
the manufacturers and the most recent codes of conduct and safety regulation. The publisher and the authors
make no representations or warranties to readers, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of this
material. Without limiting the foregoing, the publisher and the authors make no representations or warranties as
to the accuracy or efficacy of the drug dosages mentioned in the material. The authors and the publisher do not
accept, and expressly disclaim, any responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk that may be claimed or incurred as
a consequence of the use and/or application of any of the contents of this material.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments vii
About the Editors and Contributors xi
3. The European Context: Declining Health but Rising Labor Force Participation
among the Middle-Aged 69
Axel Börsch-Supan, Irene Ferrari, Giacomo Pasini, and Luca Salerno
9. Ad Hoc, Limited, and Reactive: How Firms Respond to an Aging Workforce 196
Peter Berg and Matthew M. Piszczek
10. How Caregiving for Parents Reduces Women’s Employment: Patterns across
Sociodemographic Groups 213
Sean Fahle and Kathleen McGarry
12. How Does Social Security Reform Indecision Affect Younger Cohorts? 254
John B. Shoven, Sita Nataraj Slavov, and John G. Watson
14. What Is the Way Forward? American Policy and Working Longer 301
Lisa F. Berkman, Beth C. Truesdale, and Alexandra Mitukiewicz
Index 323
Acknowledgments
This book grew from the collective thinking of many close friends and colleagues. First, we
acknowledge the superb and enlightened leadership of Kathleen Christensen, who led the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s decade-long research program on working longer that created
networks of researchers and sparked this book. Kathleen was essential as she supported the
broad, interdisciplinary thinking that pushed us all to think beyond the narrow financial
issues of retirement and to embrace questions about the dignity and meaning of work, how
families affect and were affected by working longer, the intersection between work and health
issues that older workers face, and how older adults continue to contribute in meaningful
ways to their society.
The Advisory Board of the Working Longer program at Sloan inspired much of our
thinking. We especially want to thank David Wise, who calmly, in his inimitable fashion,
asked the killer, hardest questions of us. In one of our final meetings for the program, David
asked a question that gave birth to the idea for this book. He said: What about all the older
people we are not counting in our employment statistics? What about all the middle-aged
people who are not counted in unemployment statistics because they have left the labor
force? Surely, we don’t anticipate that we will bring those people back into the workforce at
62 or 65 to work even longer? The day David Wise made that comment was the start of the
Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) Working Longer Conference, led
by John Shoven, another key player in this volume. During that conference we started to flesh
out the idea for the volume. Many of the people we wanted to write chapters were in the room
that day. We also wanted to look more widely for a truly interdisciplinary group of authors
who could bring new perspectives. Lively conversations followed, and the book was born.
Kathleen Christensen found support from Sloan for the book, and we were on.
Funding for this book was predicated on the idea that good things happen when people
meet and talk and then write and again meet and discuss. Sloan generously funded us to
gather the authors in person for two meetings to improve our ideas together and create more
viii | A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
connections among the chapters. Intense meetings at the Harvard Center for Population
and Development Studies and engaged conversations between the meetings strengthened
the links among chapters and created opportunities for critical review. This was especially
important because our authors included experts in economics, sociology, psychology, or-
ganizational behavior, political science, and epidemiology, whose different disciplines
helped to expand our collective thinking. Again, we thank Kathleen Christensen and Jeffrey
Cunningham for the support of these activities and their understanding of the ways in which
the volume was greatly strengthened by the conversations.
An important part of Sloan’s mission has been to expand the community of research on
work and aging. Thus, we invited senior scholars to recruit colleagues and junior scholars to
coauthor chapters in the volume. The more junior authors in this volume inherit the job of
moving the field forward.
We deeply thank all the authors for their generous engagement and participation in
the entire project as well as for their insightful chapters. They also read our introductory and
closing policy chapters and provided enormously helpful feedback. They corrected errors,
added nuance, and made us think harder. They agreed with some of our ideas and disagreed
with others, and we are grateful for both. We thank all our contributors: Margaret E. Beier,
Peter Berg, Ben Berger, Axel Börsch-Supan, Gary Burtless, Courtney C. Coile, Meghan K.
Davenport, Sean Fahle, Irene Ferrari, Richard B. Freeman, Mary Gatta, Jacob S. Hacker,
Jessica Horning, Michael D. Hurd, Italo López García, Nicole Maestas, Kathleen McGarry,
Alexandra Mitukiewicz, Kathleen J. Mullen, Giacomo Pasini, Paul Pierson, Matthew
M. Piszczek, Susann Rohwedder, Luca Salerno, John B. Shoven, Sita Nataraj Slavov, and John
G. Watson. Their contributions have made this volume greater than the sum of its parts.
The Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies has been a home to this
project in both the intellectual and emotional sense. Our Center has strived to be a deeply
collaborative home to intellectual discourse across many disciplines and perspectives. It is
dedicated to understanding population dynamics and to producing new knowledge that
can help to reduce economic, social, and health inequities. Lesley Harkins organized events,
communicated with authors, and helped prepare the entire manuscript for publication; Laura
Price, Rob Correia, and Claudette Agustin kept the logistics running beautifully; and many
colleagues provided stimulating conversations and moral support. Alexandra Mitukiewicz
contributed stellar data skills, writing, policy insights, and unstinting good humor, first as a
research assistant and then as a coauthor. We are fortunate to have had the chance to work
with this outstanding team.
At Oxford University Press, Chad Zimmerman recognized the value of this book even
before our ideas were fully formed. We could not have proceeded without his support of our
proposal. We are grateful to Sarah Humphreville and Emma Hodgdon, who became our
editors midway through and shepherded the book all the way through peer review and pro-
duction. Oxford University Press has supported work in the interdisciplinary areas of health
equity and social determinants of health for decades. We appreciate OUP’s ongoing commit-
ment to work in this area.
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s | ix
Truesdale is grateful to the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research for sup-
porting her work on this volume in its later stages. When she moved from Harvard to the
Upjohn Institute, she gained a wonderful new set of colleagues whose deep understanding of
labor markets was matched only by the warmth of their welcome. The Institute has proved
to be an ideal place to study the cross-currents of work, aging, and retirement in America.
Finally, we thank our teachers and our students: all those whose curiosity has inspired
us to learn more about the world we inhabit and to share what we have learned. You are too
many to list here, but you know who you are. And we thank our families. We hope our chil-
dren (Erin and Leah) and grandchildren (Klara, Elio, Amalia, and Ezra) grow up in a world
where good jobs are plentiful and security in old age is assured.
—Lisa F. Berkman and Beth C. Truesdale
About the Editors and
Contributors
Editors
Lisa F. Berkman is the Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development
Studies (HCPDS) and the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy, Epidemiology, and
Global Health and Population at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Her re-
search focuses on identifying and developing solutions for inequalities in health related to
work conditions and social policy, socioeconomic status, and social networks and isolation.
Beth C. Truesdale is a Research Fellow at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment
Research and a visiting scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development
Studies. Her research focuses on inequalities in work and aging, the future of retirement, and
the effects of social institutions and public policies on Americans’ well-being. She holds a
PhD in sociology from Harvard University.
Contributors
Margaret E. Beier is a Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Rice
University in Houston, Texas. Her research examines the influence of individual differences
in age, gender, abilities, and motivation as related to success in educational and organiza-
tional environments. In particular, she examines the cognitive, attitudinal, and motivational
determinants of job and training performance, job choice and retirement, and the influ-
ence of these factors on lifelong development and learning. Her work has been funded by
the National Science Foundation (NSF), and she is a fellow of the Society for Industrial
xii | A b o u t the Editors and Contributors
and Organizational Psychologists (SIOP) and a fellow of the Association for Psychological
Science (APS).
Peter Berg is Professor of Employment Relations and Director of the School of Human
Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. His research interests include
work-life flexibility policies and practices, the implications of an aging workforce for organi-
zations, and international comparisons of working time.
Ben Berger is a PhD Candidate in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of
Government and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He studies how
public policy shapes the diffusion of scientific breakthroughs and adoption of innovative
health care technologies.
Axel Börsch-Supan is the Director of the Munich Center for the Economic of Aging at
the Max-Planck-Society. He is also Professor of Economics at the Technical University of
Munich and a NBER Research Associate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He leads the Survey
of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). His research is about population
aging, retirement, saving, pensions, and health at older ages.
and labor supply. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Los
Angeles.
Mary Gatta is an Associate Professor of Sociology at City University of New York (Guttman).
Her research focuses on policy and programs that can improve job quality and economic
security for marginalized workers. She has written on workplace flexibility for low-wage
workers, the experiences of women navigating public workforce systems, and older workers
and retirement insecurity. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Rutgers University.
Jacob S. Hacker is Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University. An expert
on American governance, he is the author or coauthor of more than a half-dozen books, nu-
merous journal articles, and a wide range of popular writings. His latest book, written with
Paul Pierson, is Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. He
is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of
Political and Social Science and was awarded the Robert Ball Award of the National Academy
of Social Insurance in 2020.
Jessica Horning is currently a Data Associate with the Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit
immigration law firm, and previously worked at Wider Opportunities for Women on issues
surrounding economic security. Her research has focused on economic security for fam-
ilies, women, and elders, which has spanned issues surrounding the labor market, safety net
programs, and retirement supports.
Michael D. Hurd is a Senior Principal Researcher at RAND, Director of the RAND Center
for the Study of Aging, and a member of the NBER. His research interests include retire-
ment, pensions, Social Security, the determinants of consumption and saving, the economic
effects of the Great Recession, the cost of dementia, the lifetime use of nursing homes, survey
xiv | A b o u t the Editors and Contributors
methods, and the properties and uses of subjective probabilities. He is a coinvestigator of the
Health and Retirement Study.
Italo López García is an Economist at the RAND Corporation, a Research Fellow of the
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and a Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
His research interests include labor economics and development economics, with a focus on
the study of the determinants of human capital investments over the life cycle.
Kathleen J. Mullen is a Senior Economist and the Director of the RAND Center for Disability
Research. Her research addresses intersections between health and work, including the ef-
fects of health on employment and the role of job demands and working conditions in deter-
mining health status and labor force participation, particularly at older ages. She holds a PhD
in Economics from the University of Chicago.
Paul Pierson is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California
at Berkeley and Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of American Democracy. His
About the Editors and C o n t r i b u t o r s | xv
teaching and research areas include the fields of American politics and public policy, com-
parative political economy, and social theory.
Susann Rohwedder is a Senior Economist at RAND and Associate Director of the RAND
Center for the Study of Aging. Her research focuses on the economics of aging in the areas
of household consumption and saving behavior, financial security of households, retirement,
long-term care, the prevalence and cost of dementia, and individuals’ expectation formation.
She holds a PhD in Economics from University College London.
Luca Salerno is a Researcher at the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging of the Max
Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy. His research interests focus on social policy
and health developments. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Technical University of
Munich.
John B. Shoven is the Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
and the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford. He is also a Senior Fellow
at the Hoover Institution and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic
Research. He specializes in public finance and corporate finance and has published on Social
Security, health economics, corporate and personal taxation, mutual funds, pension plans,
economic demography, and applied general equilibrium economics.
Sita Nataraj Slavov is a Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George
Mason University, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and
a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She has previously served
as a Senior Economist specializing in public finance issues at the White House’s Council of
Economic Advisers and a member of the 2019 Social Security Technical Panel on Assumptions
and Methods. Her research focuses on public finance and the economics of aging, including
issues relating to older people’s work decisions, Social Security, and tax reform.
John G. Watson is a Lecturer in Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His
current research focuses on life-cycle models and what they tell us about preparing for our
retirement years. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Is Working Longer in Jeopardy?
Lisa F. Berkman and Beth C. Truesdale1
1. Introduction
Worldwide, aging populations are one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments—and one of
our greatest challenges. As longevity has risen and fertility has fallen, older adults make up a
larger portion of populations. Without a doubt, societies can reap more benefits from older
people’s contributions than they did in previous generations. At the same time, this demo-
graphic transition changes everything—including how nations navigate work and retirement.
On average, Americans live much longer and healthier lives than they did 50 years
ago and substantially longer than when Social Security was created in the 1930s. Many pol-
icymakers and academics think it is logical—almost inevitable—that Americans will spend
more of these years in the paid labor force.2
Working longer, it is argued, is a win-win-win solution for society, employers, and
workers. Working longer and delaying retirement could cut the cost of Social Security for
an aging population; provide a bigger pool of experienced labor; and shore up individuals’
financial security. In particular, longer life expectancies mean that Americans need income
to support more years of life, and working longer is a commonly proposed solution. Some re-
search even suggests that working longer leads to better health in older age by helping adults
maintain cognitive skills and social networks. The idea that longer lives should translate nat-
urally and seamlessly into longer working lives has become the mainstream policy position
in America and in many wealthy nations.3
The purpose of this book is to examine the viability of this working-longer framework.
This volume emerged as an idea during conversations at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s
Working Longer Initiative. Near the end of a 10-year run of this advisory group’s meetings,
we started to question exactly who we were counting in labor and employment statistics—or
more precisely, who we were leaving out. In thinking about working-longer ideals, we began
to examine the pitfalls as well as the promises. For older Americans, what were the challenges
and barriers to working longer? Were major trends in the United States making working
longer an easier and more attractive pathway—or just the opposite?
Lisa F. Berkman and Beth C. Truesdale, Is Working Longer in Jeopardy? In: Overtime. Edited by: Lisa F. Berkman and Beth C. Truesdale,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197512067.003.0001
2 | Overtime
weakening the government’s capability to respond to the needs of an aging population. Tax
cuts, policies that undermine labor unions, weak enforcement of rules that protect workers,
increased political polarization, and the rising political clout of the very wealthy have com-
bined to put an aging workforce into a precarious position. These issues are not merely a
matter for individuals to respond to by themselves. Population aging is a matter of demog-
raphy; our response to it is a matter of politics and policy.
The stresses faced by so many Americans are partly a function of trying to continue to
work in the paid labor force while facing difficult job conditions, health problems, or care-
giving needs while lacking the protection and support that only robust democratic govern-
ments can provide. Growing older in America is, for many, a hard path to travel.
These long-term trends suggested serious challenges to the working-longer policy
framework even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated existing inequalities in
employment, health, and family life. We see this as a pivotal moment to jettison old projec-
tions based on assumptions that may have been reasonable in the mid-twentieth century but
are now outdated. It is time to explore more deeply what current patterns can tell us about
new policy solutions that would benefit Americans in the decades to come. For America to
be resilient to demographic, economic, and political challenges, we must understand the
conditions that influence participation in the paid workforce and the conditions that produce
exits from the workforce.
In the face of both population aging and rising inequality, what is the future of working
longer?
* * *
Our introduction to this volume is divided into two parts. In the first section, we outline
trends in American demographics, health, family dynamics, jobs, and politics in some depth,
because the evidence in these five areas—well-known to researchers in those areas but often
neglected in the working-longer conversation—is a key motivation for this book.
Then we turn to the new frontiers of research on aging, work, and retirement. To gen-
erate a well-rounded picture of the promises and pitfalls of the working-longer policy solu-
tion, we asked experts to examine the evidence in their fields and to fill gaps in that evidence.
The core of the book comprises 13 chapters, drawing on expertise from investigators in eco-
nomics, sociology, psychology, organizational behavior, political science, and epidemiology.
In the second section of this chapter, we describe what they uncovered. The final chapter in
this volume describes a policy framework integrating the domains of work and retirement,
which we argue flows from the evidence developed in this book.
We carry two themes throughout this book: (a) the consequences of large and
growing economic and social inequalities and (b) changes across generations or birth co-
horts, especially considering the circumstances of middle-aged adults now in their “prime”
working years.
The theme of social and economic inequality is important because averages hide huge
differences across social, demographic, and economic groups—differences that shape our
capacity to work, the skills and resources we have, the discrimination and other challenges
we face, and the benefits that may accrue to us for working longer. For instance, raising
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