Seminar Series | Social Security Reform: Work and Welfare Responses Across Occupations

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Sterling Hall, Conference Room 1328
@ 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm
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University of Wisconsin-Madison Assistant Professor of Public Affairs Lindsay Jacobs will present for the Seminar Series.


About Lindsay Jacobs

Lindsay Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Public Affairs. She specializes in labor economics, with an emphasis on older populations. Her current research projects look at retirement preparedness and modeling the interactions among health, job tasks, and labor supply decisions.

Prior to joining La Follette, she was an economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

About the presentation

Social Security faces long-run financing shortfalls, and further increasing the Full Retirement Age is a prominent reform option. Using Health and Retirement Study data, I examine how past increases affected work, claiming, and disability across occupations and estimate a model of welfare, saving, and retirement decisions under alternative rules. Blue-collar workers, whose productivity declines more steeply with age, show larger labor-supply reductions and higher disability application when the early eligibility age rises. I evaluate more occupation-neutral policy designs and show that ignoring occupational heterogeneity overstates fiscal savings and understates welfare costs of raising retirement ages.

Please note that this event may be photographed. Images and other content may be published on Flickr and/or used to promote the La Follette School of Public Affairs in the future.

Organizer

La Follette School of Public Affairs,

Contact

Mindy Walker, mindy.walker@wisc.edu

Profile photo of Lindsay Jacobs