The Impact of the 1990's French Reform on Farmers Retirement Decisions

In this paper, we examine the effects of the french government's 1990 reform of the farming sector on indiviuals' retirement behavior. This reform has induced different changes in the Social Security Wealth of farmers living in different rural areas, and thus provided a ``natural experiment'' framework. Therefore, we can use this reform to evaluate the impact of Social Security on retirement decisions using French individual data. For that purpose, we have applied the statistical framework developed in the recent literature on evaluating social programs. Our results show that the retirement decisions of farmers appear not to be influenced by the changes induced by the 1990 reform.