Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 79, No. 1

(released February 2019)
by Christopher R. Tamborini, Patrick J. Purcell, and Anya Olsen

This article's authors use data from the 1995 and 2015 Current Population Surveys to provide multi-layered descriptive statistics on the retirement and socioeconomic characteristics of veterans aged 55 or older. The authors explore indicators of family structure, work, income from Social Security and other sources, and economic security. They also investigate differences in educational attainment and race/ethnicity within and across veteran and nonveteran samples over the two-decade span. Further, they account for age and cohort effects by separately analyzing three age groups: 55–61, 62–69, and 70 or older. The authors find important within-group differences among aged veterans across education and racial/ethnic groups and over time, and discuss the implications of their findings.

by Patrick J. Purcell

The Social Security Administration maintains wage-and-salary earnings records for all American workers. From those administrative records, the agency extracts a 1-percent sample called the Continuous Work History Sample (CWHS) for research and statistical purposes. This article uses CWHS data to examine trends in women's real wage-and-salary earnings from 1981 through 2015. It first describes broad trends for all women aged 25–59. Then it describes the trends over that same span for women in each of seven 5-year age intervals (25–29, 30–34, 35–39, 40–44, 45–49, 50–54, and 55–59), with detail by individual birth cohort. A series of charts shows how women's real wages changed over time both across age groups and across birth cohorts within an age group.

by Ӧzlen D. Luznar and Jackson Costa

Policymakers seek effective ways to restore or maintain the labor force participation of current and potential Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries. The availability of certain types of employer-provided benefits may affect whether workers with health impairments are able to maintain employment. In this research note, we use National Compensation Survey data to estimate the availability of employer-sponsored health insurance and paid leave by industry of employment.