Home › Academics › McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies › Faculty & Administration › Yung-Ping Chen

Faculty & Staff

Areas of Expertise

Financing and Benefit Structure of Social Security, Differential Pension Coverage for Black and Hispanic workers, Concept of and Problems with Reverse Mortgages, a New Model for Funding Long-term Care, Concept of and Barriers to Phased Retirement.

Degrees

PhD, Economics, University of Washington
MA, Economics, University of Washington
BA, National Taiwan University

Additional Information

Currently a fellow in the Gerontology Institute and an emeritus professor, Yung-Ping (Bing) Chen, PhD, was a professor of Gerontology and has held the Frank J. Manning Eminent Scholar's Chair at UMass Boston from 1988 until his retirement in 2009.  For many years he taught at UCLA, where he received a Warren C. Scoville Distinguished Teaching Award (Economics).

Professor Chen's research is concentrated in five interrelated areas in retirement security: Financing and benefit structure of Social Security, differential pension coverage for black and Hispanic workers, concept of and problems with reverse mortgages, a new model for funding long-term care, and concept of and barriers to phased retirement.

Professor Chen has been active in policy development. He has been a delegate to four consecutive White House Conferences on Aging (1971, 1981, 1995, and 2005) and the 1998 White House Conference on Social Security. He served on the expert panel of the 1979 Advisory Council on Social Security. He has also frequently testified before Congressional committees and national commissions on approximately 35 occasions.

Professor Chen is a fellow in the Gerontological Society of America (a past chair of the economics of aging interest group and founding editor of its newsletter), a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, a member of Sigma Phi Omega (national honor society in gerontology), as well as Omicron Delta Epsilon (international honor society in economics), and  fellow in the World Demographic Association. He was
co-winner of the John Hanson Memorial Prize from the Actuarial Foundation in 2009, and received the 2010 Robert W. Kleemeeir Award for outstanding research in the field of gerontology from the Gerontological Society of America.

Born and raised in China and a graduate of National Taiwan University, Professor Chen earned graduate degrees in economics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He started as a law student in China and he passed the Chinese national civil service examination for diplomatic and consular services. He also attended the master's degree program in mental health sciences at Hahnemann University in Philadelphia.

Professor Chen's CV