Most conceptualisations of the bottom billion assume that "the poor" are a minority group in a state of continuous dependency, identifiable by region and demographic. Using a flow analysis (inflow and outflow) of poverty, rather than a stock analysis, we explain why poverty is more appropriately...

Many Belgian retire well before the statutory retirement age. Numerous exit routes from the labor force can be identified: old-age pensions, conventional early retirement, disability insurance, and unemployment insurance are the most prominent ones. We analyze the retirement decision of Belgian...

The paper studies retirement behavior of wage‐earners in Belgium – for the first time using rich survey data to explore retirement incentives as faced by individuals. Specifically, we use SHARE data to estimate a model à la Stock and Wise (1990). Exploring the longitudinal nature of...

As a preliminary step, we first provide some new empirical evidence that labor market conditions affect retirement decisions at the individual level: unemployed people are more likely to retire. Our main objective in this paper is then to propose an equilibrium unemployment approach to...

We use a US Social Security reform as a quasi-experiment to provide evidence on framing effects in retirement behavior. The reform increased the full retirement age (FRA) from 65 to 66 in two month increments per year of birth for cohorts born from 1938 to 1943. We find strong evidence that the...

In Germany, there is an ongoing debate about how to increase the efficiency of the social security system. The aim of this paper is to simulate different financing systems for Germany with its typical Conservative welfare state regime. For our analysis, we rely on the European static...

It is now a commonplace that the unfunded public pension systems of many OECD countries will run into severe financing problems in the coming decades due to a dramatically increasing pensioner/worker ratio. While this diagnosis is completely undisputed, there is still a vigorous debate on the...

Recent literature makes a distinction between 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' early retirement, where 'involuntary' early retirement results from employment constraints rather than from a preference for leisure relative to work. This paper analyzes 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' early retirement...

We develop a general equilibrium stochastic OLG model with heterogenous households. Households differ with respect to their productivity. Productivity depends stochastically on parents' unobservable investment in their child's human capital and an aggregate productivity shock. We introduce a...

We study the labor supply dynamics of elderly couples by means of a structural collective model. The model allows for general externalities with respect to spouses’ leisure. Preferences and the intrahousehold bargaining process are identified by using panel data with couples and individuals...