In this paper, we analyze the extent to what financial incentives have influenced individual and couples retirement decisions over the last two decades in Spain. We use administrative data on earnings histories to create synthetic measures of financial incentives that we link to individual...

We examine the labor supply impact of a 2016 policy that allows retirement-eligible individuals covered by Peru's private pension system to receive retirement benefits as a lump sum rather than as an annuity. We present a theoretical model predicting that, for liquidity constrained workers, the...

The Social Security earnings test reduces benefits at a 33-50% rate once earnings pass a threshold amount - among the highest marginal tax rates in the economy. Previous research dismissed the importance of the earnings test but failed to take advantage of three changes in the earnings test...

A structural life-cycle retirement model with an improved specification over previous models is used to analyze and compare the long-run labor supply effects of the rules for Social Security in place in 1972,1977 and 1983, and for an actuarially fair system. The effects of separate provisions...

Many provisions of the Social Security Program distort an individual's labor supply incentives. In particular, the payroll tax, the earnings test, the offsetting actuarial adjustment, and the dependence of the size of future benefits on the level of current earnings all affect the net return to...

This paper shows that, contrary to commonly held views, the provisions of the social security law actually provide strong work incentives for older men. The reason is that, for most workers, higher current earnings lead to higher future social security benefits. These incentives have been...

In the last twenty years the labor force participation rates of 45 to 54-year-old men have fallen 10.6 percentage points among non-whites and 4.4 percentage points among whites. I find that nearly half of this puzzling decline can be explained by the growth of the Social Security Disability...

In this study the social security earnings test is shown to have a significant effect empirically on the labor supply of retirement aged men. A rich data file from the Social Security Administration containing accurate benefit information provides a cross- section sample of 65-70 year old...

We investigate the impact of the Social Security Annual Earnings Test (AET) on the employment decisions of older Americans. The AET reduces Social Security benefits by one dollar for every two dollars earned above the exempt amount. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that the...