This is the introduction and summary to the sixth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social...

Workers nearing retirement face many important, and often irreversible, choices. We collected detailed demographic and financial literacy data on over 1,500 workers nearing retirement at three large companies to assess how individuals are planning for retirement. Many respondents display limited...

This is the introduction and summary to the ninth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. This project, which compares the experiences of a dozen developed countries, was launched in the mid 1990s, following decades of decline in the labor force...

Many firms give post-retirement increases in pension benefits to retirees even though the pension contract does not require such increases. A leading explanation of this behavior is that benefit increases are part of an implicit contract where retirees accept lower initial benefits in return for...

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...

A critical question for Social Security policy is how program incentives affect retirement behavior. We use the wealth of new data available through the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) to examine the impact of Social Security incentives on male retirement. We implement forward-looking models...

This paper examines why pension plans increased their liabflities by giving benefit increases to persons no longer working even though almost al lof them were not required to do so by any legally enforceable contract. In our model workers and firms have implicit contracts under which...

Employers have been launching phased retirement programs to help workers navigate the transition from work to retirement more effectively. This paper examines the experience of the phased retirement system for tenured faculty in the University of North Carolina system. After phased retirement...

Many organizations provide retirement planning seminars to their employees as a benefit to help them make better informed retirement decisions. This study examines the participants in 85 seminars conducted by five companies in 2008 and 2009 to determine how much learning takes place and whether...