New Policies for an Older Unemployed Population

This study updates what we know about the Great Recession’s impact on older unemployed Americans’ health and pre-retirement life by focusing on their wealth and income sources, health insurance access, poverty rates, unemployment duration, labor force drop-out rates, and Social Security claiming from 2009 through 2012 using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the Current Population survey (CPS) (Sum, Ishwar and Trubskyy. 2011, Rix 2011 and Van Horn, Corre and Heidkamp 2011). A unique contribution is an in-depth description of unemployed older Americans’ asset levels using recent cross-sectional and longitudinal data that tracks individuals over time to evaluate how their assets changed because of unemployment. All this information helps evaluate how unemployed older Americans have weathered the Great Recession of 2007, five years later.