In addition, crowding in the labor market caused by boomers continuing to work due to lack of retirement savings will continue to depress their wages as they age, "relative to what would have happened had their share of the labor force declined at the same rate as prior generations."

Boomers, the study finds, are staying in the labor force longer than prior generations.

In fact, boomers' share of the labor force has only fallen 27 percentage points in the three decades after the cohort reached its highest share of the labor force, compared with the 31 percent decline in the share of the Silent Generation after its peak and the 46 percent drop in the Greatest Generation's share.

How does that translate into dollars and cents?

The study reports that, if boomers' share of the labor force declined at the same rate as that of the Silent Generation, high school-educated boomers would have earned $800 more in 2015. Boomers with some college would have brought home earnings of $1,500 more, and boomers with a degree would have been paid $1,700 more.

Average real wages grew slowly for boomers during their youth (ages 22–34) and also when they hit their prime (ages 35–54), growing just 3.9 percent per year during their youth—less growth than smaller generations received. The Silent Generation received 5 percent growth, while GenX (born 1965–1982) gets 6.3 percent.

Even when boomers hit their prime, their wages grew only 0.7 percent a year.

That's less than any generation in the last 70 years. The Greatest Generation, born from 1900 to 1924, experienced 1.6 percent a year wage growth and GenX's real earnings grew 1.3 percent a year when they hit their prime.

The study finds that for all levels of education, a larger birth-year cohort is associated with lower average earnings, and that the wage-reducing effect persists even late in a worker's career.

A one percent increase in a cohort's share of the labor force decreases real hourly earnings by 0.5 percent among prime-age high-school-educated workers, 0.7 percent for those with some college-level education and 0.6 percent for college graduates.

As a result, keeping boomers in the job market longer also keeps them working for depressed pay, which means they will have to work longer yet to shore up retirement savings.

Policymakers advocating delayed retirement as a solution to the retirement savings crisis need to be aware of this, since a job market filled with older workers will continue to pay depressed wages, even further delaying retirement for those who remain physically capable of working.