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We use data from Social Security administrative records to examine the lifetime patterns of initial entitlement to retired-worker and Disability Insurance (DI) benefits across cohorts born in different years. Breaking out age-at-entitlement patterns for different birth-year cohorts reveals close adherence in entitlement ages to changes in program rules, such as increasing the full retirement age. The proportion of a cohort that becomes newly entitled to DI benefits rises noticeably during recessions and at ages 50 and 55, and cumulative entitlement rate patterns show that more recent cohorts rely increasingly on DI benefits in their late 30s and 40s.

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This article describes responses to removing the retirement earnings test in 2000 for persons at the full retirement age or older. We examine annual earnings and retirement benefit claims from Social Security administrative data that cover the 4 years before and after the change. Three findings emerge from the study. First, the effect on earnings of removing the earnings test is uneven across people with different earnings levels. We find little effect on earnings at lower levels, but the effect on earnings in the mid to upper levels (50th to 80th percentiles) is large and significant. Such a finding indicates that the removal most affects people with earnings levels above the earnings test threshold. The largest increases in earnings are found at the 70th percentile for persons who have attained ages 65-69 and at the 60th percentile for those turning 65. Second, there is no clear evidence of the effect of the test's removal on the overall rate of labor force participation. A small rise in work participation among individuals aged 65-69 may be at least partially attributable to the trend already under way. Increases in work participation that do occur are mostly attributable to retaining older workers rather than inducing older workers back into the workforce. The effect appears to increase over time, suggesting that the removal has long-lasting effects on work participation. Third, the removal of the earnings test accelerated applications for benefits by 2 to 5 percentage points among individuals aged 65-69 and by 3 to 7 percentage points among those reaching age 65.

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This article examines changes in the age at which people claim Social Security retirement benefits in response to two recent changes in the Social Security rules: the removal of the retirement earnings test at ages 65 to 69 in 2000 and the gradual increase in the full retirement age (FRA) for those born in 1938 or later. Data come from the 1 percent sample of Social Security administrative data for 1997-2005. Descriptive and regression analyses show that the largest effect of the change in the earnings test rule in 2000 occurs at age 65. At that age, the proportion of people who claim retirement benefits increases by about 4 percentage points among men and 2 percentage points among women. The response to the gradual increase in the FRA occurs not only among those who are close to the FRA but also among those who are close to the early retirement age.

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Each year in March, the Board of Trustees of the Social Security trust funds reports on the current and projected financial condition of the Social Security programs. Those programs, which pay monthly benefits to retired workers and their families, to the survivors of deceased workers, and to disabled workers and their families, are financed through the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds. In their 2003 report, the Trustees present, for the first time, results from a stochastic model of the combined OASDI trust funds. Stochastic modeling is an important new tool for Social Security policy analysis and offers the promise of valuable new insights into the financial status of the OASDI trust funds and the effects of policy changes. The results presented in this article demonstrate that several stochastic models deliver broadly consistent results even though they use very different approaches and assumptions. However, they also show that the variation in trust fund outcomes differs as the approach and assumptions are varied. Which approach and assumptions are best suited for Social Security policy analysis remains an open question. Further research is needed before the promise of stochastic modeling is fully realized. For example, neither parameter uncertainty nor variability in ultimate assumption values is recognized explicitly in the analyses. Despite this caveat, stochastic modeling results are already shedding new light on the range and distribution of trust fund outcomes that might occur in the future.

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