IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wil/wileco/2008-16.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Taxes, Wages, and the Labor Supply of Older Americans

Author

Listed:

Abstract

Given the aging of the U.S. population, and the greater contributions of older workers to the labor force, understanding how policy levers can affect elderly labor supply has become increasingly important. In this paper we use data from the Health and Retirement Study linked to state identifiers to estimate the responsiveness of the labor supply of older workers to the wage and features of the tax code, both on the probability of participating in the labor market, as well as on hours of work for those who choose to work. We find that a 10 percent increase in the wage is associated with a five percent increase in participation, and we estimate slightly larger responses to marginal tax rates. These results suggest that government policies could increase the labor supply of older individuals by changing the returns to work through the tax code.

Suggested Citation

  • Lucie Schmidt & Purvi Sevak, 2008. "Taxes, Wages, and the Labor Supply of Older Americans," Department of Economics Working Papers 2008-16, Department of Economics, Williams College.
  • Handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2008-16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/Schmidt_Sevak_ROA_final_2.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Aging; Labor Supply; Elderly; Taxes;
    All these keywords.

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2008-16. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Greg Phelan (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edwilus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.