TY - JOUR AU - Duggan,Mark AU - Singleton,Perry AU - Song,Jae TI - Aching to Retire? The Rise in the Full Retirement Age and its Impact on the Disability Rolls JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11811 PY - 2005 Y2 - December 2005 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11811 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11811.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Mark Duggan The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania 1452 Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall 3620 Locust Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104 Tel: 215-898-0928 Fax: 215-898-7635 E-Mail: mduggan@wharton.upenn.edu Perry Singleton, II Center for Policy Research Syracuse University 426 Eggers Hall Syracuse, NY 13244 Tel: (315) 443-3690 Fax: (315) 443-1081 E-Mail: psinglet@syr.edu Jae Song Social Security Administration Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics 500 E Street, SW, 9th Floor Washington, DC 20254 E-Mail: jae.song@ssa.gov AB - The Social Security Amendments of 1983 reduced the generosity of Social Security retired worker benefits in the U.S. by increasing the program's full retirement age from 65 to 67 and increasing the penalty for claiming benefits at the early retirement age of 62. These changes were phased in gradually, so that individuals born in or before 1937 were unaffected and those born in 1960 or later were fully affected. No corresponding changes were made to the program's disabled worker benefits, and thus the relative generosity of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits increased. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the Amendments on SSDI enrollment by exploiting variation across birth cohorts in the policy-induced reduction in the present value of retired worker benefits. Our findings indicate that the Amendments significantly increased SSDI enrollment since 1983, with an additional 0.6 percent of men and 0.9 percent of women between the ages of 45 and 64 receiving SSDI benefits in 2005 as a result of the changes. Our results further indicate that these effects will continue to increase during the next two decades, as those fully exposed to the reduction in retirement benefit generosity reach their fifties and early sixties. ER -