Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries. In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women’s later-in-life work. Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits. A pioneering study of recent trends in older women’s labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.

In recent years, the retirement age for public pensions has increased across many countries, and additional increases are in progress or under discussion in many more. The seventh stage of an ongoing research project studying the relationship between social security programs and labor force participation, Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: The Capacity to Work at Older Ages explores people’s capacity to work beyond the current retirement age. It brings together an international team of scholars from twelve countries—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—to analyze this issue. Contributors find that many—but not all—individuals have substantial capacity to work at older ages. However, they also consider how policymakers might divide gains in life expectancy between years of work and retirement, as well as the main impediments to longer work life. They consider factors that influence the demand for older workers, as well as the evolution of health and disability status, which may affect labor supply from the older population.

A Documentary History tells the story of the creation and development of the U.S. Social Security program through primary source documents, from its antecendents and founding in 1935, to the controversial issues of the present. This unique reference presents the complex history of Social Security in an accessible volume that highlights the program's major moments and events.

A vast majority of failures emanate from stress concentrators such as geometrical discontinuities. The role of stress concentration was first highlighted by Inglis (1912) who gives a stress concentration factor for an elliptical defect, and later by Neuber (1936). With the progress in computing, it is now possible to compute the real stress distribution at a notch tip. This distribution is not simple, but looks like pseudo-singularity as in principle the power dependence with distance remains. This distribution is governed by the notch stress intensity factor which is the basis of Notch Fracture Mechanics. Notch Fracture Mechanics is associated with the volumetric method which postulates that fracture requires a physical volume. Since fatigue also needs a physical process volume, Notch Fracture Mechanics can easily be extended to fatigue emanating from a stress concentration.

Social Security Policy in a Changing Environment analyzes the changing economic and demographic environment in which social insurance programs that benefit elderly households will operate. It also explores how these ongoing trends will affect future beneficiaries, under both the current social security program and potential reform options. In this volume, an esteemed group of economists probes the challenge posed to Social Security by an aging population. The researchers examine trends in private sector retirement saving and health care costs, as well as the uncertain nature of future demographic, economic, and social trends—including marriage and divorce rates and female participation in the labor force. Recognizing the ambiguity of the environment in which the Social Security system must operate and evolve, this landmark book explores factors that policymakers must consider in designing policies that are resilient enough to survive in an economically and demographically uncertain society.

This volume represents the most important work to date on one of the pressing policy issues of the moment: the privatization of social security. Although social security is facing enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an aging population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. Privatizing Social Security fills this void by studying the methods and problems involved in shifting from the current system to one based on mandatory saving in individual accounts. "Timely and important. . . . [Privatizing Social Security] presents a forceful case for a radical shift from the existing unfunded, pay-as-you-go single national program to a mandatory funded program with individual savings accounts. . . . An extensive analysis of how a privatized plan would work in the United States is supplemented with the experiences of five other countries that have privatized plans." —Library Journal "[A] high-powered collection of essays by top experts in the field."—Timothy Taylor, Public Interest

Why has an economy that has done so many things right failed to grow fast? Under-Rewarded Efforts traces Mexico’s disappointing growth to flawed microeconomic policies that have suppressed productivity growth and nullified the expected benefits of the country’s reform efforts. Fast growth will not occur doing more of the same or focusing on issues that may be key bottlenecks to productivity growth elsewhere, but not in Mexico. It will only result from inclusive institutions that effectively protect workers against risks, redistribute towards those in need, and simultaneously align entrepreneurs’ and workers’ incentives to raise productivity.