Boston College's Center for Retirement Research (CRR) recently received $1.9 million in funding for this year from the Social Security Administration.
The CRR was founded in 1998 and has received over $12 million in funding since its inception. The goal of the CRR is to research retirement issues and to share the findings with policymakers and other researchers. The CRR currently has seven full-time staff members and seven research assistants from both undergraduate and graduate classes.
"The grant allows us to pursue approximately 10 new research projects covering a variety of topics. It also provides core support to help cover staff salaries," said Andrew Eschtruth, associate director of external relations for the CRR. "On the dissemination front, it provides funding for our popular series of issues in brief and for a major conference in Washington, D.C."
"Our group of affiliated researchers includes many of the nation's top scholars and we are very effective at distributing research findings broadly so that we have become a 'first stop' for many reporters covering the issues that we explore," said Eschtruth. Professor Alicia Munnell, founder of the CRR, has served on the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, in the U.S. Treasury Department, and on the President's Council of Economic Advisers.
"The Center has proven itself as one of the nation's leading organizations devoted to retirement income policy issues," said Eschtruth.
Of the current CRR projects, Eschtruth said, "We have a wide variety of projects underway that cover our four core areas of Social Security, employer-sponsored pensions (including 401k plans), household saving for retirement, and labor force issues involving older workers."
He also spoke of the CRR's goal to find a good measure of personal savings for retirement and the hiring of older workers as the labor force ages.
Michael Smyer, associate vice president of research of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences said, "Centers and institutes, like the Center for Retirement Research, play an important role in the intellectual life of a university." Dean Smyer said academic centers provide areas where students and faculty from BC and all over the country can collaborate on important issues. Smyer cited the CRR as an example of many branches of study coming together. "In the CRR, for example, BC faculty members are drawn from the departments of sociology, economics, and finance, the Graduate School of Social Work, and the Carroll School of Management."
Smyer noted the involvement of students from the undergraduate to graduate level and said, "In many ways, these research apprenticeships are formative experiences for students at the outset of their careers."
Dean Smyer said, "About 50 percent of our external funding for research comes through activities based in centers or institutes at Boston College," and that the faculty is very active in submitting proposals for future grants.
Jamie Lee, CSOM '06, speaking of working as a research assistant for the CRR, said, "For me, the CRR has been a great experience. It has given me the opportunity to work with a leading expert, Professor Munnell, in the increasingly important field of retirement research." Lee spoke of the topics he has learned about including private pensions and the long-run solvency of Social Security, and said, "My understanding of both economics and research in general has grown tremendously."
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