Date of Award

6-26-2026

Date Published

August 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Public Administration

Advisor(s)

Emily Wiemers

Subject Categories

Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Public Policy | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

Rising life expectancy and declining fertility rates have led to rapid population aging in many countries. To address the resulting fiscal pressures on social insurance programs and encourage longer labor force participation among older adults, many countries have reformed their public pension systems. In the United States, the Social Security Amendments of 1983 gradually increased the Full Retirement Age (FRA)—the age of eligibility for full, unreduced Social Security benefits—from 65 to 67. While prior research has extensively examined whether this reform delayed Social Security claiming and retirement, much less is known about its broader and longer-term consequences for well-being, including consequences that extend beyond individuals to their families. My dissertation consists of three chapters that examine these broader outcomes. The first chapter examines how increasing the FRA affects multiple dimensions of health, including mental health, cognition, subjective memory, and functional limitations, among men and women. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I find improvements in mental health, cognition, and memory-related outcomes for both men and women in their 60s. Physical health effects, however, differ by gender. Women are more likely to report pain and greater difficulty with activities involving large muscle groups. I further focus on more vulnerable groups who likely to face greater challenges from delayed retirement, including people with less education and those in physically demanding jobs, and found little evidence of disproportionate negative effects. To examine long-term effects of the policy reform, I also extend the analysis to follow respondents into their 70s and find a reduced risk of cognitive impairment at these later ages among women. The second chapter is the first to examine the labor market effects of the FRA reform beyond retirement by focusing on unemployment outcomes among older workers. Specifically, it investigates how increases in the FRA affect both the risk of unemployment and the time spent unemployed among workers ages 58 to 65. I also assess spillover effects on the unemployment insurance (UI) system as a potential bridge until workers reach eligibility for Social Security benefits by linking the generosity of UI benefits across states and across time. Using monthly data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), I find that cohorts facing higher FRAs experience higher rates of unemployment, although the duration of unemployment remains unchanged. Instead, these cohorts are more likely to exit unemployment through employment rather than through retirement or continued joblessness, and there is little evidence of strategic UI use. The third chapter examines the tension faced by individuals with a higher FRA as they balance working longer with providing care to their grandchildren. Using the HRS, which provides rich family-level information, I investigate how FRA-induced changes in retirement incentives affect whether and how much older adults care for their grandchildren, separately for couples, single men, and single women. The results suggest that the FRA increase reduces the probability that couples provide 100 or more hours of grandchild care at the household level. This reduction is driven largely by less intensive caregiving couples, in which neither spouse individually provides 100 or more hours of care but their combined care hours reach the 100-hour threshold. At the individual level, I find that married or partnered women reduce their probability of providing 500 or more hours of care, a level of involvement that is more likely to conflict with longer labor force attachment. Among singles, none of the estimates are precisely estimated, likely due to smaller sample sizes.

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