Yay for the Center for Retirement Research, which is doing its part to rectify the dearth of research on workers age 65 and up.  Dubbing their subjects “the elderly,” a paper by economists Steven Haider and David Loughran titled “Elderly Labor Supply: Work or Play?” looks at who in this group works, at what, and why they stop. Here are some of their findings, some predictable and some considerably less so:

I’ve just finished making my way through an excellent book: Aging Well by Dr. George E. Vaillant, a psychiatrist and the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development.  The study has used periodic interviews and questionnaires to track three groups of elderly men and women since 1937, making it the longest prospective study of physical and mental health in the world.

How much longer is a Connecticut resident likely to be around than someone who lives in Mississippi? Three full decades. That’s not the scariest statistic in the new Human Development Index report on well-being in the United States. The life expectancy gap between Asian-American males and black Americans in those states is a staggering 50 years.

You don’t have to be a shrink to figure out that one of the reasons I tackled this project was to face my own fears about aging and death. And guess what? It’s working.