Eric Toder

By Eric Toder
Senior Fellow, the Urban Institute

Under a grant from the Sloan Foundation, the Urban Institute has sponsored an expert panel conference and will prepare a report on ways of capitalizing on the value of older adults’ work. The panel meeting was held on October 3, 2007 at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC and included experts from universities, research organizations, business, private consulting, the federal government, Congressional staffs, and groups representing women, minorities, and older Americans. The discussion focused on four main issues:

• Are older people willing or able to work?
• Are employers willing to hire and retain older workers?
• Does public policy discourage work at older ages? and
• What public and private strategies could promote work at older ages?

Participants were asked to assess evidence that more people may want to continue working at older ages, comment on how future economic and demographic trends in the United States will affect demand for and earnings prospects of older workers, discuss how the design of federal health and retirement benefits, rules governing defined benefit pension plans, and other federal regulations might discourage employment of older workers and how those policies might be modified, and consider ways of facilitating increased use of flexible work arrangements to encourage work among older adults.

The participants covered much familiar ground in the discussion, but some new directions were emphasized. Some suggested that much more attention needed to be given to distributional effects and how demand and supply for labor might differ for workers of different educational, skill, and income levels. There was extensive discussion of whether boomers would behave differently from prior cohorts. The increases in labor force participation at older ages observed to date in part reflect differences in measurable factors such as higher education levels, improved health, higher lifetime labor force participation of women, changed incentives from lower Social Security replacement rates and the shift from defined contribution to defined benefit pension plans, but some participants speculated about whether, beyond this, there were additional unique attributes of the boomer cohorts that would cause them to want to work longer. Others commented on the actual and perceived legal issues surrounding flexible work arrangements and what might be done to make employers more comfortable about using them. Finally, some suggested more research on the experiences of states and non-profit organizations, both as potential employers of older workers and as employers who have confronted the demographic wave of retirements earlier than others.

The Urban Institute will be preparing a summary of the conference, posting the transcript, and preparing a more detailed analysis of how changes in occupational composition and characteristics of the population might affect demands for older workers. In addition, the Institute held a follow-up public event at the Urban Institute on Tuesday, December 4, “Who Will Hire Me When I’m 64? Challenges in Increasing the Employment of Older Workers”, that further explored these issues.