Facilitating Work at Older Ages, 2019-2022

This proposal requests support for a new two-year phase of collaborative study on facilitating work at older ages. The continuing project will engage a network of scholars with substantial past and ongoing research on health and health trends, population aging, retirement policy, and labor markets. The Sloan funding leverages the ongoing work of these investigators toward the explicit question of how to prolong working lives among those who are able, delivering a set of incrementally important research products that build on the research team’s past and ongoing scholarship.
In two prior phases, we analyzed how health trends and policy incentives affect people’s work and retirement decisions as they age. This third phase focuses instead on where older workers fit into the modern labor market, how the interaction of supply and demand for older workers is changing the conditions of work at older ages, and how these aspects of the marketplace in turn affect the work and retirement decisions that people make. When combined with previous phases, we believe we are developing a deeper understanding of what drives work decisions at older ages, and what might be done to facilitate longer working lives.