OLS Estimation Results for Selected Measures of Mean Social Security Income
| Dependent Variable: Social Security Income of the | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male Head (1) | Others (2) | Family (3) | Family (4) | Family (5) | |
| Parameter estimates | |||||
| Early entitlement age | 359 (44) | −65 (20) | 294 (43) | 183 (28) | 116 (31) |
| Social Security income adjusted by the OECD equivalence scale | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Additional controls | |||||
| Age and calendar year effects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Demographics and veteran status | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Medicare and DI effects | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Quarters of coverage for age-72 benefits | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Quartic function of simulated Social Security income for age-65 claiming | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Estimated impacts | |||||
| Dependent variable mean prior to availability of early claiming | 7,560 | 1,724 | 9,284 | 6,668 | 6,668 |
| Estimated impact of one-year reduction in early entitlement age as a % of dependent variable mean prior to availability of early claiming | −4.8 | 3.8 | −3.2 | −2.7 | −1.7 |
| Estimated impact of weighted-average actual reduction in claiming age for 1916 cohort (1.35 years earlier) as a % of dependent variable prior to availability of early claiming | −6.4 | 5.1 | −4.3 | −3.7 | −2.4 |
| p-value for placebo test | 0.00001 | 0.00001 | 0.00001 | 0.00001 | 0.00001 |
Notes: N = 658. The first row shows the parameter estimate of β in Equation 1, which is the impact of a one-year increase in the early entitlement age on the Social Security income measure. Each column represents a different regression based on a different measure of Social Security income. Columns 1–3 do not adjust for family size, whereas Columns 4 and 5 do. All regressions include a full set of age and year dummies. Column 5 adds a quartic in simulated Social Security income for age-65 claiming to control for trends in benefit generosity across cohorts that were not due to early claiming, plus controls for the percentage in age/year cell that are: veteran status, white, high school graduate, some college, college graduate, advanced degree, plus eligibility for Medicare and DI, and quarters of coverage for age-72 benefits, respectively. Standard errors clustered by year of birth are shown in parentheses. The first row in Estimated impacts section shows the dependent variable mean for cohorts not eligible for early claiming. The next row is (minus) the quotient of the estimate in the first panel and the mean in the first row in the section and represents the estimated impact of a one-year reduction in the claiming age as a percent of the dependent variable for the cohorts not exposed to early claiming. The third row in the section represents the estimated impact of the long-run actual reduction in the claiming age (as measured by the 1916 cohort) as a percent of the dependent variable for the cohorts not exposed to early claiming. The final row of the table shows the p-value associated with the placebo test whereby the early entitlement age is randomly assigned. The null hypothesis is that β in Equation 1 is zero. The p-value is based on 1,000 replications and is estimated using the estimator of Heß (2017).