A fundamental question in personal finance is deciding when to retire. This article is a theoretical investigation within a conventional life-cycle setting. It finds two closed-form solutions to the retirement timing problem. One solution, based on an isoelastic form of the utility function and...

Post-retirement, the model in the main text (published in the Review of Economic Dynamics) reduces to the Merton (1969) problem, which has of course an exact solution. Pre-retirement, however, the agent holds an American option, namely, retire now or keep working. Problems involving American...