The NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center (RDRC) has two competitive training programs for junior scholars. The RDRC is funded by a cooperative agreement with the Social Security Administration through its Retirement and Disability Research Consortium.
In a typical year, the programs provide training and education for two or three pre-doctoral scholars and two post-doctoral fellows who are engaged in research focused on topics related to Social Security's Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs and related federal policies. Predoctoral scholars work at their home universities under the guidance of their dissertation advisors, while postdoctoral scholars work in-residence at the NBER. The postdoctoral fellowships are suitable for either new PhDs or junior faculty on sabbatical. The fellowships are closely coordinated with other NBER postdoctoral fellowships in complementary subject areas, including on the economics of aging (funded by the National Institute on Aging), the economics of an aging workforce (funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation), and long-run fiscal policy (funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation). The RDRC training programs and other research opportunities made available through the NBER have supported many young scholars in pursuing research relevant to Social Security programs and populations.
2021-22 Postdoctoral Training Fellows:

Kuan-Ming Chen obtained his PhD in 2021 from the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. His current research focuses on long-term care and its implications for families, including how adult children adjust their labor supply when parents develop care needs and how access to international caregivers affects these decisions, as well as how children’s long-term care needs affect families. He will be an assistant professor at National Taiwan University starting in the fall of 2022.

Maxwell Kellogg obtained his PhD in 2021 from the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. In the fall of 2022, Max will be joining the faculty of the Department of Economics of the University of Oslo as an assistant professor. His current work assesses how selection into Social Security Disability Insurance is driven by access to health insurance coverage, and the consequences of Medicaid expansion for the program's utilization and social value. More broadly, his research concerns household self-insurance behaviors and their interactions with social safety net programs.
2021-22 Pre-Doctoral Training Fellows:

Jonathan Cohen is a PhD candidate in the economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cohen's research focuses on how workers and firms respond to the unemployment insurance system. For example, he studies a historical German policy intended to decrease the usage of unemployment insurance as a bridge to retirement by requiring larger firms to cover unemployment benefits for long-tenured older workers, making use of eligibility discontinuities in which firms must pay and which of those firms' workers are covered. In separate work, he studies the employment effects of unemployment insurance, particularly for workers with uncertain eligibility who may not receive any benefits at all.

Ari Ne’eman is a PhD candidate in the Health Policy Program at Harvard University. He utilizes administrative data to study the impact of the Department of Justice’s Olmstead litigation on employment and earnings outcomes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. He is also interested in researching long-term services and the impact of Medicaid Managed Care on people with disabilities.

Martina Uccioli is a PhD candidate in the economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Uccioli's research focuses on job instability and its effects on workers’ life choices, from fertility to disability insurance receipt and retirement behavior. Her recent work studies how flexibility in the workplace affects the labor supply of new parents, and how workplace flexibility compares to more traditional forms of support for parents such as paid parental leave. More broadly, Uccioli is interested in interactions and complementarities between labor market institutions and welfare policies.