Assoc. Prof. Dan Fetter

Social Security and the Long-Run Well-Being of Recipients and Their Children

During his visit at CES, Daniel Fetter will continue work on two projects that use the introduction and early expansion of Social Security in the United States to study the program’s long-run effects on the well-being of older Americans and their families. Both projects exploit cross-industry differences in the timing of Social Security coverage in the early years of the program, combined with newly constructed datasets linking individuals in the 1930 full-count Census to their long-run outcomes and to those of their adult children.

In the paper “Long-Run Intergenerational Effects of Social Security” (with Lee Lockwood and Paul Mohnen), Mr. Fetter and his coauthors find that individuals whose parents were more likely to receive Social Security earned more in adulthood, were more likely to have migrated away from their parents’ location, and lived in better neighborhoods near the end of their lives. The results suggest that a key channel was migration to better-matched labor markets, and that in the early years of the program, the financial gains to recipients’ children may have rivaled or exceeded the direct gains to recipients themselves. In a newer project, “The Introduction of Social Security and Elderly Mortality” (with Lee Lockwood, Paul Mohnen, and Joseph Price), he investigates the program’s effects on longevity, finding that Social Security extended men’s lives – particularly for those in physically demanding or hazardous occupations – but had no comparable effect for women.

Mr. Fetter’s broader research lies at the intersection of economic history and public economics, with a focus on using historical episodes to shed light on the essential economics of policies that remain central to contemporary debates, including Social Security and housing policy.

Daniel Fetter is an Associate Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and an NBER Research Associate. Prior to joining Dartmouth in 2023, he was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University and, before that, an Associate Professor at Wellesley College. He holds a PhD in Political Economy and Government (Economics) from Harvard University, an MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the London School of Economics, and a BA in Economics from Wesleyan University.