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During the Great Recession, more older workers have claimed Social Security benefits early. This paper addresses two important policy questions: Who are these early claimers? How much retirement income have they lost as a result of claiming early? Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) we estimate a discrete-time hazard model that makes claiming Social Security benefits a function of age, personal characteristics, and the national unemployment rate. We project that high unemployment rates during the Great Recession led to a 5-percentage-point increase in the probability of claiming early relative to a less severe recession such as the 2001-2003 downturn, and this increase was nearly uniform across socioeconomic groups. Our estimates also suggest that while the Great Recession did impact the claiming decision, it did not cause a dramatic change in benefits. “Great Recession Claimers” – those whom we simulate were likely to claim early during the Great Recession but would not have in a milder downturn – filed for Social Security only 6 months earlier, on average, than they would have in a minor recession. This modest change in timing reduced their monthly Social Security benefit checks by $56, or 4.6 percent of average monthly benefits, and the Social Security replacement rate fell by 1.7 percentage points relative to a more typical recession. The benefit reduction resulted from the combined effect of the actuarial reduction for early claiming and the foregone opportunity to continue working and increase the wage base used for calculating benefits.

State and local governments have been facing an extraordinarily difficult fiscal environment in recent years. One of many challenges has been restoring public pension plans to a sound fiscal footing after the economic crisis of 2007-09. States have begun to respond by enacting a mix of revenue increases and benefit cuts. These changes will, over time, improve the financial outlook for plans and help ease their impact on other budget priorities. This study analyzes the nature and magnitude of these effects by analyzing pension costs before the financial crisis, after the financial crisis, and after reforms for a sample of 32 plans in 15 states. The results show that most of the sample plans responded with significant pension reforms, generally increasing employee contributions and lowering benefits for new employees; the changes were largest for plans with serious underfunding and those with generous benefits; in most cases, reforms fully offset or more than offset the impact of the financial crisis on the sponsors’ annual required contribution; and employer contributions to accruing benefits for new employees were cut in half, sharply lowering compensation for future workers. In short, states have made more changes than commonly thought. Whether these changes stick or not is an open question.

The social safety net responded in significant and favorable ways during the Great Recession. Aggregate per capita expenditures grew significantly, with particularly strong growth in the SNAP, EITC, UI, and Medicaid programs. Distributionally, the increase in transfers was widely shared across demographic groups, including families with and without children, single-parent and two-parent families. Transfers grew as well among families with more employed members and with fewer employed members. However, the increase in transfer amounts was not strongly progressive across income classes within the low-income population, increasingly slightly more for those just below the poverty line and those just above it, compared to those at the bottom of the income distribution. This is mainly the result of the EITC program, which provides greater benefits to those with higher family earnings. The expansions of SNAP and UI benefitted those at the bottom of the income distribution to a greater extent.

The General Social Survey panel of 2006-2010 tracked Americans' reactions to the election of Barack Obama and the Great Recession (officially lasting from December 2007 to March 2009) as well as to events in their personal lives. Americans were less happy in 2010 than in 2006; the percent "very happy" decreased by four percentage points and the percent "not too happy" increased almost as much. In the cross section, standard predictors - including church attendance, family income, and marital status - continued to matter. Looking from the dynamic perspective of the panel study, though, we see that job loss and changing family incomes mattered far more. Changes in marital status were also important for changing morale; marrying made people happier while divorcing made them unhappy. The subjective sense that finances were improving mediated a significant portion of the income-happiness association. The effects of unemployment and marriage are estimated in a way that supports the inference that finding a job or a mate actually causes happiness to increase.