Retirement incentives, individual heterogeneity and labor transitions of employed and unemployed workers

In this paper, we analyze the sensitivity of the labor market decisions of workers close to retirement with respect to the incentives created by public regulations. We improve upon the extensive prior literature on the effect of pension incentives on retirement by jointly modeling the transitions between employment, unemployment and retirement, paying special attention to the transition from unemployment to retirement (which is particularly important in Spain and other European countries, and whose relevance is increasing as a result of the recent economic crisis).