Behavior

October 12, 2021

In 1983, Congress introduced gradual increases in the eligibility age for full Social Security benefits from 65 to 67. The increases, starting in 2000 and continuing today, have meant larger reductions in the monthly checks for people who sign up for their benefits early.

This was a major cut to Social Security benefits, and it has had an impact. Retirement rates have declined among workers in their early 60s as they delayed retirement to make up for the larger penalties for claiming their benefits early, a new study found.

Estimating the effect of this change on retirements is challenging, so the researchers compared actual retirement rates after the reform with their estimates of what the rates would’ve been if Congress had not increased the full retirement age. They also calculated the retirement rates a few different ways. Their main estimate, based on three decades of U.S. Census data, was notable, because it showed a substantial decline in retirements at age 62, which is the first time workers can collect Social Security – and the age that exacts the biggest penalty in the form of a smaller monthly check.

At ages 63 to 65, the penalties for claiming early shrink – and the effect of the reform was less noticeable.

But the main estimate of retirement rates – the incidence rate – showed that the 1983 increase in retirement penalties had a significant impact on 62-year-olds. The incidence rate is the number of people in a given year who retire at 62 as a percentage of everyone in their birth cohort.

The results showed that 10 percent of the men – all workers born after 1937 – left the labor force when they were 62. That’s about 5 percentage points less than the rate would’ve been without the reform.

For women, the incidence rate at 62 was 8.4 percent, which is about 2 points less than if there had been no reform. Their response may have been more muted because women retire for different reasons than men. …Learn More

Research

September 23, 2021

The option to start Social Security benefits at any age from 62 to 70 – with an actuarial adjustment – is a key feature of the program. However, the adjustments – reductions in the monthly benefit for claiming early and increases for waiting – are decades old and do not reflect improvements in longevity or other important developments over time.

The option to claim early was introduced just over 60 years ago, when Congress set 62 as the program’s earliest eligibility age. The option to claim between 65 and 70 on an actuarially fair basis stems from the 1983 Social Security amendments, which gradually increased the annual “delayed retirement credit” from 3 percent to 8 percent. Also in 1983, reductions for early claiming were changed in tandem with the gradual increase in the full retirement age from 65 to 67.

The goal of actuarial adjustments to the monthly benefits has always been to ensure that retirees with average life expectancy could expect to get the same total lifetime benefits, regardless of when they started. But calculating lifetime benefits requires assumptions about how long people will live and assumptions about interest rates. The current calculations are based on life expectancy and interest rates in the early 1960s or 1980s.

Much has changed since those dates: life expectancy has increased dramatically and interest rates have declined. Longer life expectancy and, to a lesser extent, lower interest rates would each call for a smaller penalty for early claiming and a smaller reward for delaying claiming.

Consider what this means for baby boomers whose full retirement age is 67. Under the current system, if they claim at 62, they receive 70 percent of their age-67 benefit. However, to reflect decades of increasing life spans and falling interest rates, the researchers calculated that the accurate monthly benefit would be 77.5 percent of the age-67 benefit. That is, early claimers are penalized too much.

For workers who delay claiming, a discrepancy also exists between the current and accurate delayed retirement credits, though the difference is smaller since the credit was initially too small. Specifically, workers who wait until 70 to start Social Security today receive 124 percent of the benefit they would’ve gotten at 67, whereas 120 percent of the age-67 benefit would be more accurate. …Learn More