Elderly

This paper asks whether expanding pension benefits increases political participation among retirees, testing policy feedback and habit-formation theories with a causal design. The authors leverage a large pension reform in Illinois that raised benefits and use a regression discontinuity approach on administrative records to estimate turnout effects among retired public employees across multiple elections.

Many elderly people in the Global South lack official proof of age and identity and thus long reside in the blind spot of states—especially those who are poor, indigenous, live in rural areas, or worked outside the formal sector. This study asks how states can "go the last mile" to incorporate these marginalized elders and what prompts them to register births decades after the fact.