Public Economics.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meeting

The NBER's Program on Public Economics met in Cambridge on November 2-3. Joshua Rauh and Austan Goolsbee, NBER and University of Chicago, organized the meeting. These papers were discussed:

Mark Duggan, University of Maryland and NBER; Perry Singleton, University of Maryland; and Jae Song, Social Security Administration, "Aching to Retire? The Rise in the Full Retirement Age and its Impact on the Disability Rolls" (NBER Working Paper No. 11811)

Discussant: Jonathan Gruber, MIT and NBER

Jeffrey Liehman, Harvard University and NBER, and Emmanuel Saez, University of California, Berkeley and NBER, "Earnings Responses to Increases in Payroll Taxes"

Discussant: Austan Goolsbee

Jonathan Gruber, MIT and NBER, and Daniel M. Hungerman, University of Notre Dame and NBER, "The Church vs. The Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?" (NBER Working Paper No. 12410)

Discussant: Edward Glaeser, Harvard University and NBER

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University and NBER, and Anton Korinek, "Dividend Taxation and Intertemporal Tax Arbitrage"

Discussant: Raj Chetty, University of California, Berkeley and NBER

Stefania Albanesi, Columbia University and NBER, "Optimal Taxation of Entrepreneurial Capital with Private Information"

Discussant: Aleh Tsyvinski, Harvard University and NBER

Stephen Coate, Cornell University and NBER, and Brian Knight, Brown University and NBER, "Socially Optimal Districting: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration"

Discussant: Richard Holden, MIT

Woodrow T. Johnson, University of Oregon, and James M. Poterba, MIT and NBER, "Taxes and the Trading Behavior of Mutual Fund Investors around Fund Distribution Dates"

Discussant: William Gentry, Williams College

Leora Friedberg, University of Virginia and NBER, and Anthony Webb, Center for Retirement Research, "Life is Cheap: Using Mortality Bonds to Hedge Aggregate Mortality Risk"

Discussant: Jeffrey Brown, University of Illinois and NBER

The Social Security Amendments of 1983 reduced the generosity of benefits for retired workers in the United States 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...