New Policies for an Older Unemployed Population

Abstract

This study updates what we know about the Great Recession’s impact on older unemployed Americans’ health and pre-retirement life by focusing on their wealth and income sources, health insurance access, poverty rates, unemployment duration, labor force drop-out rates, and Social Security claiming from 2009 through 2012 using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the Current Population survey (CPS). All this information helps evaluate how unemployed older Americans have weathered the Great Recession of 2007, five years later. We also analyze whether older workers’ unemployment spells are structural in nature and we offer some solutions to this problem.