NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
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Older Peoples' Willingness to Delay Social Security Claiming

Raimond Maurer, Olivia S. Mitchell

NBER Working Paper No. 22942
Issued in December 2016
NBER Program(s):Economics of Aging, Labor Studies, Public Economics

We have designed and fielded an experimental module in the 2014 HRS which seeks to measure older persons’ willingness to voluntarily defer claiming of Social Security benefits. In addition, we evaluate the stated willingness of older individuals to work longer, depending on the Social Security incentives offered to delay claiming their benefits. Our project extends previous work by analyzing the results from our HRS module and comparing findings from other data sources which included very much smaller samples of older persons. We show that half of the respondents would delay claiming if no work requirement were in place under the status quo, and only slightly fewer, 46%, with a work requirement. We also asked respondents how large a lump sum they would need with or without a work requirement. In the former case, the average amount needed to induce delayed claiming was about $60,400, while when part-time work was required, the average was $66,700. This implies a low utility value of leisure foregone of only $6,300, or under 20% of average household income.

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Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w22942

Forthcoming: Older Peoples’ Willingness to Delay Social Security Claiming, Raimond Maurer, Olivia S. Mitchell. in Incentives and Limitations of Employment Policies on Retirement Transitions: Comparisons of Public and Private Sectors, Clark and Newhouse. 0000

 
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