Incentive effects of pension systems are usually estimated under the assumption that the institutional environment provides a single optimal 'pathway' for retirement. However, many countries provide competing pathways which may include several early retirement options in addition to normal...

By 1992, pensions and retiree health insurance represented one quarter of the wealth of families on the verge of retirement. Our simulations suggest that between 1969 and 1992, abstracting from the effects of changes in wages and years of covered work on pension benefit amounts, changing pension...

Recent changes legislated in the U.S. Social Security system are changing the economic incentives to work and retire. Some older workers will respond to these new incentives by retiring at different ages. This paper evaluates the signs and magnitudes of these responses. Using a representative...

Older workers are likely to face different wage offers for work while not retired than for work while partially retired. Conventional analyses of wage profiles pool all waqe observations without distin-guishing among individuals according to retirement status.Our empirical analysis suggests the...

Does retirement behavior react predictably to economic incentives? Evidence on this question would be useful to policy makers responsible for work and retirement programs affecting the elderly. This paper reviews the lessons and limitations of recent economics literature on pensions, earnings,...

This study examines empirically whether social security influences the retirement decisions of individuals. The framework for this study is the life-cycle model of individual behavior. The life-cycle model shows that there are two main ways in which social security can affect behavior. One way...

Improved understanding of retirement behavior is a key to better understanding of many important economic problems. In as close as we can come to a general "social experiment," real Social Security benefits were increased substantially for the period we study the retirement patterns of a cohort...

Early retirement options alter the accrual of pension benefits, increasing the fraction of total benefits accrued in the early years of work. This is true regardless of whether de facto no worker exercises the early retirement option. No currently used actuarial method correctly calculates the...