IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crr/issbrf/ib2009-9-1.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Can the Bottom Third Work Longer?

Author

Listed:
  • Alicia H. Munnell
  • Geoffrey Sanzenbacher
  • Steven A. Sass

Abstract

Even before the sharp financial downturn, working longer had emerged as perhaps the most attractive response to the contraction of the nation’s retirement income system.1 Since the downturn, working longer increasingly seems to be the only way most work­ers approaching retirement can secure a reasonably comfortable old age. The rise in employment rates at older ages has thus received a great deal of positive attention. What has not received much attention is its unevenness. At older ages, high-skill workers have much higher employment rates than workers with lower skills. Understanding the causes and conse­quences of this pattern could have important implica­tions for policymakers concerned with strengthening retirement security. This brief addresses the question of whether men in the bottom third of the educational distribution – a proxy for earnings levels – can be expected to work longer. The first section describes the employment patterns of men and the change in employment patterns since the early 1960s. The second section examines the primary factors that might explain the decline in employment among older low-skill work­ers – changes in availability of alternative sources of income (Social Security disability and retirement benefits and the advent of the Supplemental Security Income program), changes in the composition of labor demand, and changes in health. The conclud­ing section assesses the implications for retirement income policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Alicia H. Munnell & Geoffrey Sanzenbacher & Steven A. Sass, 2009. "Can the Bottom Third Work Longer?," Issues in Brief ib2009-9-1, Center for Retirement Research, revised Jan 2009.
  • Handle: RePEc:crr:issbrf:ib2009-9-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://crr.bc.edu/briefs/can-the-bottom-third-work-longer/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crr:issbrf:ib2009-9-1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amy Grzybowski or Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crrbcus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.