Aging Seminar: Understanding the Covid-19 Retirement Boom
Join us for the Columbia Aging Center’s HYBRID seminar. Please register to attend in-person or virtually.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2024, 2:00PM-3:00PM ET
Understanding the Covid-19 Retirement Boom
Owen F. Davis, PhD
Research Fellow
Siegel Family Endowment
Hybrid seminar
Location: Zoom or 722 West 168th Street, 8th Floor Auditorium
Register to attend in-person or via zoom at:
https://columbiacuimc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0qcO6tpjwtHt29R0asQy7Emngp9EDMeuVg
About Dr. Davis’s talk:
The Covid-19 pandemic upended labor markets, leading to a sharp and sustained increase in the share of U.S. adults who are retired. In this talk, I explore the drivers of the retirement boom and its unexpected persistence. In the first part, I present findings covering the initial year of the pandemic. Using large-scale public survey data to explore patterns in employment and retirement transitions among older adults, I find that retirement transitions increased broadly across demographic groups but concentrated at the high and low ends of the earnings distribution. Job characteristics that best predicted increased pandemic retirement transitions were employment in high-contact occupations and part-time work schedules. In the second part of the talk, I zoom out to explore the persistence of the pandemic retirement boom in the years since 2020. Using approaches from machine learning to project counterfactual retirement trends, I provide current estimates for the number of excess retirees in the U.S. population and the demographic breakdown of this group. Finally, I discuss the implications for retirement policy, older adults’ welfare, and economic theories about retirement behavior.