Social Security retirement benefits in the United States (US) reflect marital histories and lifetime earnings of current and former married couples. Focusing on the link between marital history and benefit eligibility, this article examines women's marital patterns over the past two decades....

A number of alternatives to Social Security’s auxiliary benefit system have been proposed in the context of changes in American family and work patterns. This article focuses on one modification therein - lowering the 10-year duration-of-marriage requirement for divorced spouses. Using a...

There are increasing concerns about whether Americans are saving enough for retirement. Recent research has called for improved understanding of the relationship between family structure and economic preparation for retirement at earlier stages of the life course. Using multiple years of the...

This article examines emerging trends in childbearing, marital status, and earnings for U.S. women over young adulthood across recent birth cohorts spanning the late baby boom and Generation X. We use a unique dataset that matches the 1990, 1996, and 2004 fertility and marital history modules of...

Unanticipated changes in family composition can have long-lasting consequences for individuals. This chapter examines the long-term effects of marital dissolution on women's earnings and retirement. Using a longitudinal approach and a fixed-effects model, we consider three main questions. First,...

This Note uses the latest version of the Social Security Administration's Modeling Income in the Near Term microsimulation model to updated earlier projections of Social Security retirement benefits for married women. Changes in women's earnings in the late twentieth and early twenty-first...