Aging and Retirement: Evidence Across Countries

How do demographic factors influence retirement? Using a large cross-country data set, I show that in countries with a larger share of elderly in their population the length of retirement is longer. This result holds true if I control for wealth effects, and when the effective labor force participation rate of the elderly is used instead of the official retirement age. Retirement policies and the social security size are strictly related: a new variable, representing the aggregate relevance of retirement policies, turns out to be significant in explaining the size of social security. Finally, the total amount of social security transfers is positively related with the increase of the elderly population, while in per capita terms this relation is not significant. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002