It is often argued that implicit taxation on continued activity of elderly workers is responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or of first-best efficiency, there would be no such implicit taxation. The point of this paper is that when...

We study how social security influences the retirement behavior of couples. First, we exploit over two decades of full-population data and a discontinuity design to document sizable retirement spillovers to spouses when individuals reach pension eligibility age. Next, we explore underlying...