The typical defined benefit pension plan provides substantial incentives to retire early, often as young as 55. In addition, in recent years many firms have offered "window" plans that provide further incentives to retire. Window plans provide special bonuses to a specific group of workers-often...

Proposed changes in the U.S. Social Security provisions include increasing the normal retirement age from 65 to 67 and changing from 3% to 8% the increase in benefits for each year that retirement is delayed after normal retirement. The paper considers the interaction between these changes and...

Empirical analysis often raises questions of approximation to underlying individual behavior. Closer approximation may require more complex statistical specifications, On the other hand, more complex specifications may presume computational facility that is beyond the grasp of most real people...

This paper investigates the possibility, raised by Perron (1989, 1990a), that aggregate economic time series can be characterized as being stationary around broken trend lines. Unlike Perron, we treat the break date as unknown a priori. Asymptotic distributions are developed for recursive,...

The ongoing analysis of the effects of pension plan provisions on retirement is pursued in this paper. A primary objective of this paper is to test the validity of models previously developed and estimated with data from a Fortune 500 company, here using data from a second large company. The...