of the MIT public finance and labor lunches, the NASI annual conference, and the Boston College Center for Aging and Work seminar for insightful comments. Any errors are my own. AbstractAs the baby boom cohort reaches retirement age, demographic pressures on public programs such as Social Security may cause policy makers to cut benefits and encourage employment at later ages. This prospect raises the question of how much employer demand exists for older workers. This paper reports on a labor market experiment to determine the hiring conditions for older women in entry-level jobs in Boston, MA and St. Petersburg, FL. Differential interviewing by age is found for these jobs. A younger worker is more than 40 percent more likely to be offered an interview than is an older worker. No evidence is found to support taste-based discrimination as a reason for this differential, and some suggestive evidence is found to support statistical discrimination.

, and members of the MIT public finance and labor lunches for insightful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

This paper exploits a major mid-1990s expansion in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care system to provide evidence on the labor market effects of expanding health insurance availability. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the labor market behavior of older veterans and non-veterans before and after the VA health benefits expansion to test the impact of public health insurance on labor supply. We find that older workers are significantly more likely to decrease work both on the extensive and intensive margins after receiving access to non-employer based insurance. Workers with some college education or a college degree are more likely to transition into self-employment, a result consistent with “job-lock” effects. However, less-educated workers are more likely to leave self-employment, a result suggesting that the positive income effect from receiving public insurance dominates the “job-lock” effect for these workers. Some relatively disadvantaged sub-populations may also increase their labor supply after gaining greater access to public insurance, consistent with complementary positive health effects of health care access or decreased work disincentives for these groups. We conclude that this reform has affected employment and retirement decisions, and suggest that future moves toward universal coverage or expansions of Medicare are likely to have significant labor market effects.

This article exploits an unusual aspect of the policy for enforcement of the federal 1968 Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which made filing an age discrimination claim less burdensome in some states. After the enforcement of the federal law, white male workers over age 50 in states where the federal government allows an easier filing procedure were .2 percentage points less likely to be hired than were workers in states without such laws. They also worked .8-1.3 fewer weeks per year and were .5-.7 percentage points more likely to report being retired, 1.6-1.8 percentage points more likely to report that they are not in the labor force, and 1.6- 3 percentage points more likely to report that they are not employed. These findings suggest that in an anti-age-discrimination environment, firms seek to avoid litigation through means not intended by the legislation-by not employing older workers in the first place. (c) 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, part of a consortium that includes parallel centers at the University of Michigan and the National Bureau of Economic Research, was established in 1998 through a grant from the Social Security Administration. The goals of the Center are to promote research on retirement issues, to transmit new findings to the policy community and the public, to help train new scholars, and to broaden access to valuable data sources. Through these initiatives, the Center hopes to forge a strong link between the academic and policy communities around an issue of critical importance to the nation's future.

We argue that the environment determines life span, using historical data to show that such indicators of environmental insults in early childhood and young adulthood as quarter of birth, residence, occupation, wealth, and the incidence of specific infectious diseases affected older age mortality. Consistent with improvements in early life factors, we find that the effect of quarter of birth on older age mortality has diminished over the twentieth century and that the declining impact of quarter of birth explains 16 to 17 percent of the difference in ten year mortality rates of Americans age 60-79 in 1900 and in 1960-1980. We estimate that at least one-fifth of the increase between 1900 and 1999 in the probability of a 65 year old surviving to age 85 may be attributable to early life conditions. We also present suggestive evidence on the mortality trajectory of the oldest old in the first half of the twentieth century that implies that the shape of the mortality trajectory, though not its level, has remained constant.

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I have no disclosures to make. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.