Editors and Contributors

Co-Editors

Head shot of Lisa Berkman

Lisa F. Berkman

Director, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies 
Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Berkman is an internationally recognized social epidemiologist whose work focuses extensively on social and policy influences on population health and health equity. Her research orients toward understanding inequalities in health related to working conditions, social and economic policies, and social networks and isolation.
Head shot of Beth Truesdale

Beth C. Truesdale

Research Fellow, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research
Visiting Scientist, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies
Dr. Truesdale is a sociologist whose research focuses on inequalities in work and aging, the future of retirement, and the effects of social institutions and public policies on Americans’ well-being. 

Contributors

Margaret E. Beier

Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Rice University, Houston, Texas
Beier's research examines the influence of individual differences in age, gender, abilities, and motivation as related to success in educational and organizational environments. In particular, she examines the cognitive, attitudinal, and motivational determinants of job and training performance, job choice and retirement, and the influence of these factors on lifelong development and learning. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and she is a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychologists (SIOP) and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS). 

Peter Berg

Professor of Employment Relations and Director of the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations, Michigan State University
Berg's research interests include work-life flexibility policies and practices, the implications of an aging workforce for organizations, and international comparisons of working time.

Ben Berger

PhD candidate in public policy, Harvard Kennedy School
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow
Berger studies how public policy shapes the diffusion of scientific breakthroughs and adoption of innovative health care technologies.

Axel Börsch-Supan

Director, Munich Center for the Economic of Aging at the Max-Planck-Society
Professor of economics, Technical University of Munich
Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Cambridge, Massachusetts
Börsch-Supan leads the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). His research is about population aging, retirement, saving, pensions, and health at older ages.

Gary Burtless

Senior Fellow (Emeritus) in Economics at the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC
Burtless graduated from Yale College and earned his PhD in economics at M.I.T. His research focuses on aging, saving, labor markets, income distribution, social insurance, and the behavioral effects of government policy. He is coauthor of, among other books, "Growth with Equity: Economic Policymaking for the Next Century," (1993) and "Can America Afford to Grow Old? Paying for Social Security," (1989). Burtless has also written many scholarly and popular articles on the economic effects of Social Security, public welfare, unemployment insurance, and taxes.

Courtney C. Coile

Professor of Economics, Wellesley College
Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research
Co-Director, NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center; Co-Director, International Social Security project
Coile's research focuses on the economics of aging and health, with particular interests in retirement decisions and public programs

Meghan K. Davenport

PhD Student in Psychological Sciences (with a focus on industrial- organizational psychology), Rice University

Davenport's research focuses on the psychology of workplace aging, with a specific focus on motivation, personality, and earning across the lifespan.

Sean Fahle

Research Fellow in the Department of Economics, University of Tübingen
His research centers on the microeconomic behavior of households, particularly their decisions concerning savings, long- term care, intergenerational transfers, and labor supply. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Irene Ferrari

Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of University Ca’ Foscari of Venice

Ferrari's research interests lie in the fields of labor economics, economics of aging, policy evaluation, and household finance. In her research she uses survey data, mostly from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), as well as large administrative datasets. Ferrari holds a PhD in economics from the University of Bologna. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy— Munich Center for the Economics of Aging.

Richard B. Freeman

Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics, Harvard University
Research Associate, NBER
Faculty Co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School
Freeman's research interests include the job market for scientists and engineers; the transformation of scientific ideas into innovations; Chinese and Korean labor markets; the effects of AI and robots on the job market; and forms of labor market representation and employee ownership. Freeman is co-editor of the Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership (JPEO).

Mary Gatta

Associate Professor of Sociology at City University of New York (Guttman)

Gatta's research focuses on policy and programs that can improve job quality and economic security for marginalized workers. She has written on workplace flexibility for low- wage workers, the experiences of women navigating public workforce systems, and older workers and retirement insecurity. She holds a PhD in sociology from Rutgers University.

Jacob S. Hacker

Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science, Yale University
An expert on American governance, Hacker is the author or coauthor of more than a half- dozen books, numerous journal articles, and a wide range of popular writings. His latest book, written with Paul Pierson, is "Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality." He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science and was awarded the Robert Ball Award of the National Academy of Social Insurance in 2020.

Jessica Horning

Data Associate with the Tahirih Justice Center (a non-profit immigration law firm)

Horning's research has focused on economic security for families, women, and elders, which has spanned issues surrounding the labor market, safety net programs, and retirement supports.

Michael D. Hurd

Senior Principal Researcher and Director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging
Member of the NBER
Hurd's research interests include retirement, pensions, Social Security, the determinants of consumption and saving, the economic effects of the Great Recession, the cost of dementia, the lifetime use of nursing homes, survey methods, and the properties and uses of subjective probabilities. He is a co-investigator of the Health and Retirement Study.

Italo López García

Economist, RAND Corporation
Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School
López García's research interests include labor economics and development economics, with a focus on the study of the determinants of human capital investments over the life cycle.

Nicole Maestas

Associate Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School
Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Director, NBER’s Retirement and Disability Research Center
Maestas's research investigates work capacity among older individuals and people with disabilities, working conditions in the American labor force, the Medicaid and Medicare programs, and the opioid epidemic.

Kathleen McGarry

Professor of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles
Co-Investigator for the Health and Retirement Study
Research Associate, NBER
McGarry research focuses on the economic aspects of aging with particular attention paid to public and private transfers, including the transfer of resources within families. She has studied issues related to health insurance, long- term care insurance, and medical expenditures as well as the role played by families in providing insurance and supporting their least well-off members.

Alexandra Mitukiewicz

PhD candidate in sociology and social policy, Harvard University
Mitukiewicz's research centers on labor market inequality and policy, with a focus on aging and work, and work-family policy.

Kathleen J. Mullen

Senior Economist and the Director of the RAND Center for Disability Research
Mullen's research addresses intersections between health and work, including the effects of health on employment and the role of job demands and working conditions in determining health status and labor force participation, particularly at older ages. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

Giacomo Pasini

Professor in econometrics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
Pasini's research interests are in economics of aging, health economics, and household finance. After obtaining a PhD in economics in Venice, he moved to Utrecht for a postdoc period. He had visiting appointments at Stanford, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Goethe University of Frankfurt, Groningen University, and University of St. Gallen.

Paul Pierson

John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley
Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of American Democracy
Pierson's teaching and research areas include the fields of American politics and public policy, comparative political economy, and social theory.

Matthew M. Piszczek

Assistant Professor of Management in the Mike Ilitch School of Business, Wayne State University
 Piszczek's research focuses on work- life and age- related human resource management practices and their implications for employers and employees. He holds a PhD in industrial relations and Human Resources from Michigan State University.

Susann Rohwedder

Senior Economist at RAND and Associate Director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging.
Rohwedder's research focuses on the economics of aging in the areas of household consumption and saving behavior, financial security of households, retirement, long- term care, the prevalence and cost of dementia, and individuals’ expectation formation. She holds a PhD in economics from University College London.

Luca Salerno

Researcher at the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging of the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy

Salerno's research interests focus on social policy and health developments. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Technical University of Munich.

John B. Shoven

Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University
Shoven is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He specializes in public finance and corporate finance and has published on Social Security, health economics, corporate and personal taxation, mutual funds, pension plans, economic demography, and applied general equilibrium economics.

Sita Nataraj Slavov

Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University
Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research
Non-resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Slavov's research focuses on public finance and the economics of aging, including issues relating to older people’s work decisions, Social Security, and tax reform. She previously served as a senior economist specializing in public finance issues at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the 2019 Social Security Technical Panel on Assumptions and Methods.

John G. Watson

Lecturer in finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Watson's current research focuses on life- cycle models and what they tell us about preparing for our retirement years. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.