Meredith Slopen, a Stone Center postdoctoral scholar, was recently awarded a fellowship by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Retirement and Disability Research Center (UW RDRC) and the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) to support her project on how older workers benefit from paid family leave and paid sick leave policies. The project builds on her recent working paper on paid sick leave and the employment of adults aged 55 and older, and is aimed at finding a causal estimate of the relationship between the use of paid leave policies and labor force attachment among older workers. Arash Pourebrahimi Andouhjerdi, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the Graduate Center, is working with Slopen on the project.
In this interview, Slopen discusses her research goals, the policy implications of her work, and her interest in how public policies support workers at critical points in their lives.
What questions are you hoping to answer with this project?
Slopen: There is a growing body research on paid parental leave policies and how they impact labor force attachment after a person gives birth. But paid leave is also critical at other points in the life course. There’s been a lot less research focused on the effects of paid leave policies for older workers, and much of that work focuses on caregivers of older workers and not explicitly on the older workers themselves. This is important because the number of older adults in the workforce is large and growing. In the last 10 years we’ve seen a 56 percent increase in the share of adults over age 55 who are employed or looking for work, and it is important to know how our labor market policy environment needs to change to support these workers.
In this project, I’m looking at people who are working into older age to understand their access and use of both paid family leave — which is a longer-term paid leave policy — and paid sick leave, which is short, single-day, and accrued over the course of the year. I also look at state-level leave policies to understand how they might impact people’s labor force attachment, employment intensity, and economic security. The project relies on secondary data analysis from the American Time Use Survey and the American Community Surveys.
Why is it important to reduce unemployment and job separation among older adults?
Slopen: Displacement from a job in older age carries much greater risks to unplanned early retirement. Older workers have a harder time reentering the labor force after they leave a job, and when they do it’s often at a much lower salary. It is possible that the job security component of these policies might be particularly important in this stage of life to ensure that workers are able to meet their retirement goals by staying employed at the level they’d like to be employed at until they plan to retire.
Why haven’t there been many previous studies on the use of paid family leave and paid sick leave by older workers?
Slopen: Leave policies in the U.S. are relatively new in most states, so we haven’t had the follow-up time available to study the effects of these policies. And there are always data lags: 2023 data were just released, near the end of 2024. There’s a certain amount of catch-up time when you’re looking at some of these policies.
California is an exception: they’ve had a paid family policy since 2004, so there’s a lot of research on the California paid family leave policy, primarily looking at parental leave. It’s also easier to study parental leave, because there’s an event — having a new baby — that leads to the claim: a day when a person becomes eligible to use the policy, which we can observe in many datasets. For leave beyond the postpartum period, it’s harder to identify that time of need in survey data. Administrative data can be really useful, where it’s available, to observe the reason a person uses leave, such as, for example, bonding leave or family caregiving.
We know that nearly everybody, at some point, needs to care for a family member as they age, whether that’s a spouse, a sibling, a parent, an ill child. But it’s harder to identify the eligible population in a survey for these other reasons.
Another challenge in studying these relatively new policies is how to think about the Covid-19 pandemic and its impacts on employment and especially early retirement among older workers. Given the timing of policy implementation in many states, it is hard to separate out what would have happened, had there not been this pandemic-induced economic disruption, from the impact of paid leave policies. It is possible that paid leave policies mitigated some of the negative effects on employment, but it can be hard to separate out concurrent changes.
Are you looking specifically at the lower end of the earnings distribution?
Slopen: In a way. Most high-wage earning workers have greater access to benefits, voluntarily, from their employers. Employers use access to benefits as a way to recruit and retain workers: for example, 97 percent of the highest 10 percent of earners have access to paid sick leave, compared to 36 percent of the lowest 10 percent of earners. Outside of the states with enacted employer mandates, this is largely due to employers of higher-earning workers offering benefits, unlike employers of lower-wage workers. So the people who stand to gain the most from these policies are low-wage workers.
The introduction of public policies requires employers of low-wage workers to extend the benefits to them, so we would expect to see the effects among workers who earn lower wages, who have lower educational attainment, service industry workers: people whose employers are not providing them with access to benefits until the government says you have to do this. In my previous work on the impact of paid sick leave mandates on women’s health and employment, I found that the impacts of these policies are concentrated among these workers. Older workers — overall — tend to have higher levels of access to paid sick leave, so it is less clear how impactful mandates will be for this population.
What are the likely policy implications of this project?
Slopen: What interests me with this project is that it’s very hard to say. Especially for sick leave, this is a very low-intensity policy. It’s not clear if the impacts that we’ve seen on employment among younger workers will translate to older adults. It might not be generous enough to support their continued labor force attachment. In one study that looks at paid sick leave and others that look at paid family leave — at eligibility and how generous they are — we see that more generous policies tend to have a larger impact.
We don’t know what the impacts are for this segment of the population. But it’s important for us to find out, because if we don’t see impacts among older adults that are similar to what we’re seeing for prime age workers, then that provides lessons for policy development and advocacy.
How does this project fit within your other research?
Slopen: My research focuses on work and labor market policies as determinants of health and economic security at critical points in the life course: when people face challenges in connecting to the labor force and might need the support of public policy in order to do so.
Transitions to parenting, which is the focus of some of my previous work, is clearly one of those times. Closer to the end of someone’s career is a similar place, where workers face challenges in terms of their own health or in providing care to a family member.
I hope to continue to develop my research agenda to learn more about policies to support workers with disabilities or who encounter other health shocks. How well does our current public policy environment support workers at these times, and what would we ideally like to see to support both businesses and workers as our population ages?
What is the impact of this grant on your work?
Slopen: This grant is very meaningful to me in several ways. I am very grateful for the support it provides my work, particularly because of the mentorship component. I’ve learned a lot through monthly meetings with the Retirement Disability Research Center faculty and also my fellow grantees. We meet monthly to discuss progress and to problem-solve on our projects, and that’s been incredibly helpful in developing my research agenda and maintaining momentum.
I look forward to continuing to grow my relationships with the RDRC network. I first became involved with them when I attended their junior scholar training program. This is my second grant through the RDRC; they’ve focused on developing a pipeline of scholarship in this area.
I really encourage students at the Graduate Center to participate in that program if they’re interested in retirement or disability. It’s a great opportunity. You learn a lot in a week, meet experts in the field, and get support with developing a grant proposal. There is also a New York RDRC with opportunities for students at CUNY, including a dissertation award.
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