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To justify budgets for special and incentive (S&I) pays for career enlisted aviators (CEAs), the Air Force needs rigorous analyses on how to efficiently set S&I pays for CEAs to achieve and maintain required end strength. The authors of this report develop an analytic capability to calculate the efficient amount of S&I pays for CEAs, using RAND's Dynamic Retention Model to create separate models for each CEA specialty. They use these models to estimate the per capita cost for each CEA specialty under different policies to show the trade-offs between increasing accessions versus retaining more experienced CEAs for a given force size. They also calculate tipping-point values: the values that recruiting and training costs would need to reach in order for retaining more experienced CEAs using selective reenlistment bonuses (SRBs) to become more cost-effective than increasing accessions.

United States. --- Pay, allowances, etc.

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Unlike many large employers, the U.S. military does not offer flexible spending account (FSA) options to members of the armed services and their families. Contributions to either a health care FSA (HCFSA) and/or dependent care FSA (DCFSA) reduce the amount of income subject to income and payroll taxes, thereby reducing the individual's tax liability. FSAs interact with other tax incentives in the U.S. tax code, potentially reducing or even eliminating the potential tax savings to individuals participating in an FSA. For service members to take advantage of an FSA, they must have eligible dependent care and medical expenses for themselves or their family members. For example, in the case of health care, most members would have few or no eligible out-of-pocket medical care costs associated with TRICARE. This report presents an analysis - requested by the Office of the Secretary of Defense as input for Congress - on the implications of FSA options for active-duty service members and their families that would allow pre-tax payment of dependent care expenses, insurance premiums, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. The authors evaluate the benefits and costs of FSA options to active members and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and present an implementation plan should FSA options be implemented by DoD. They also identified legislative or administrative barriers to these options.

Soldiers --- Medical care --- Costs. --- United States --- Armed Forces --- Pay, allowances, etc.

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We use administrative tax data that cover the U.S. population to identify the causal effects of Social Security's survivors benefit receipt on American families' behavior and financial well-being. We analyze over a quarter of a million widowed households in which the husband died between 2002-2007, and we exploit a sharp age discontinuity in benefit eligibility to study the responses of financially vulnerable households to government transfers. We first study how households respond to unanticipated benefit receipt in the immediate periods following a large financial shock to investigate the protective role of transfers. We find significant impacts of the program on newly-widowed families' net income and labor supply behavior, which points to considerable allocative inefficiencies in the life insurance market and to a high valuation of survivors benefits in protecting Americans against mortality shocks. Second, to investigate the particular role of liquidity and benefit timing, we then study how already-widowed women's labor supply responds to anticipated survivors benefit receipt. We find considerable responses to cash-on-hand via benefit availability that underscore allocative inefficiencies in the credit market and the value of liquidity itself provided by government transfers. These responses and their heterogeneity highlight mechanisms that underlie the labor supply behavior of older vulnerable households, and they point to liquidity constraints, rather than myopia or benefit-schedule misperceptions, as the likely operative channel. Our results have implications for survivors benefits in the U.S., and, more generally, for retirement behavior and response mechanisms to transfers among older vulnerable populations.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Over the past ten years, maintenance career fields in the U.S. Air Force have been negatively affected by a series of events that have resulted in an experience shortage. Although there has been an improvement in Total Force manning since 2015, several skill levels are still experiencing shortages. To bridge the experience shortfall, the U.S. Government Accountability Office called for an Air Force retention strategy tailored to retain experienced maintainers. The RAND Corporation was asked to explore whether individual characteristics, economic and geographic factors, and the new Blended Retirement System (BRS) could provide additional insights into what predicts retention of this workforce. This report focuses primarily on aircraft maintenance career fields, with some attention to munitions and logistics career fields as resources permitted. The authors undertake two analytic approaches to examine the underlying determinants of retention. First, they use logistic regression to determine how strongly a variety of individual and environmental characteristics are associated with decisions to reenlist, extend an enlistment, or separate from the Air Force; second, they use RAND's Dynamic Retention Model to estimate how the new BRS will affect maintenance, munitions, and logistics career fields when those in the new system reach retention decision points. The authors find that changes in individual characteristics and environmental variables have improved retention in the maintenance, munitions, and logistics career fields. Although much of what influences retention is beyond the Air Force's control, the authors offer a number of recommendations and identify areas of emphasis that could be exploited.

Employee retention --- Personnel --- Rétention --- United States. --- États-Unis. --- Recruiting, enlistment, etc. --- Equipment --- Maintenance and repair. --- Personnel management. --- Recrutement. --- Équipement --- Entretien et réparations. --- Direction.

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We study the effects of the Social Security survivors benefits program on household labor supply and the efficiency implications for insurance and credit markets. We use U.S. population tax records and exploit a sharp age discontinuity in benefit eligibility for identification. We find that eligibility induces considerable reductions in labor supply both among newly-widowed households in the immediate post-shock periods and among already-widowed households whose benefit receipt is entirely predictable. The evidence points to liquidity constraints, rather than myopia, as a leading operative mechanism underlying household responses to anticipated benefits. Our findings identify important inefficiencies in the life insurance market and in the allocation of credit. Our results further highlight the protective insurance role of the social program and the importance of liquidity provided by the government, and they suggest potential gains from expanding and smoothing the program's benefit schedule.