This study exploits a new dataset in order to quantify the effect of financial incentives on retirement choices. This dataset contains for the first time in Italy information on seniority. In accordance with the general finding in Gruber and Wise (2004), we find that financial incentives have an...

We estimate the impact of health and financial incentives on the retirement transitions of older workers in Spain. Individual measures of pension wealth, peak and accrual values are constructed using labor market histories and health shocks are derived as changes in a composite health stock...

We present a detailed analysis of the incentives that Social Security provides for continued work at older ages. We do so using information on older males from the Health and Retirement Study over the 1980-1997 period to calculate the changes in the present discounted value of Social Security...

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...

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...

One of the most striking features of the postwar U.S. economy has been the rapid decrease in the labor force participation of the elderly at a time when the health of this group has been improving. In spite of this, previous research, based on retrospective interviews with the retired...