This paper uses panel data from the pan-European SHARE survey to study labor market behavior of older male self-employed vis-a-vis wage employed workers. We find the self-employed to work longer hours, to be more flexible in their hours allocation, and to retire later in all countries. We relate...

Recent policies aiming to prolong worklives have increased older males' labor supply. Yet, little is known about their intergenerational effects. Using unique Dutch administrative data covering three consecutive generations, this paper studies the impact of increased grandfathers' labor supply...

This paper studies the evolution of early retirement due to disease and injury in the German labor force between 1988 and 2004. Using data from the German Federation of Public Pension Providers, the IMS Health Drug Launches database and the WHO Mortality Database, we show that new drug launches...

We present a theory of the relation between health and retirement that generates testable predictions regarding the interaction of health, wealth and financial incentives in retirement decisions. The theory predicts (i) that wealthier individuals (compared to poorer individuals) are more likely...

Availability of (partial) insurance mechanisms is arguably important for the decision of (riskaverse) workers to start up a risky entrepreneurial venture. Using administrative data from Denmark, where unemployment insurance (UI) is available to both wage earners and self-employed on a voluntary...

Using Italian data, we estimate an option value model to quantify the effectof financial incentives on retirement choices. As far as we know, this isthe first empirical study to estimate the conditional multiple-years modelput forward by Stock and Wise (1990). This implies that we account...

This paper examines the role of the health gradient – the positive correlation between household income and health – in individual retirement behavior, using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP). We first estimate agegroup-specific health gradients and find their slope increases...

In January 2006, the Dutch government implemented a pension reform that substantially reduced the public pension wealth of workers born in 1950 or later. At the same time, a tax-facilitated savings plan was introduced that implied a large savings subsidy for all workers, irrespective of birth...

In the early 1990s, the Dutch social partners agreed upon transforming the generous and actuarially unfair PAYG early retirement schemes into less generous and actuarially fair capital funded schemes. The starting dates of the transitional arrangements varied by industry sector. In this study,...