The objective of the paper is to examine the retirement behaviour of Belgian workers in one-earner households who are automatically granted a more generous old-age pension benefits replacement rate, called the household replacement rate. Following a recommendation of the Belgian Pension Reform...

Precipitated by rapid globalization, rising inequality, population growth, and longevity gains, social protection programs have been on the rise in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the last three decades. However, the introduction of public benefits could displace informal mechanisms...

We study the retirement effects on mental health using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design based on the eligibility age to the state pension in the Netherlands. We find that the mental effects are heterogeneous by gender and marital status. Retirement of partnered men positively affects...

This paper examines the impact of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) in China. Exploiting the staggered implementation of an NRPS policy expansion that began in 2009, we used a difference-in-difference approach to study the effects of the introduction of pension benefits on the health status,...

This paper presents robust evidence that retirement causally improves overall life satisfaction which is subsequently explained by improvements in satisfaction with one’s financial situation, free time, health, and participation in local community activities. Furthermore, while the positive...

Retirement, a major transition in the life course, may affect many aspects of retirees' well-being, including health and health care utilization. Leveraging differential statutory retirement age (SRA) by occupation for China's urban female workers, we provide some of the first evidence on the...

This paper investigates the impact of pension income on living arrangements of the elderly. Taking advantage of a unique opportunity due to the recent establishment and expansion of the New Rural Pension Scheme in China, we explicitly address the endogeneity of pension status and pension income...

Grants and services provided by the government may crowd out informal arrangements, thus weakening informal caring relations and networks. In this paper, we examine the impact of social security expansion on neighborhood cohesion of elders using China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), one of...

We estimate the impact of pension enrollment on mental well-being using China's New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), the largest existing pension program in the world. Since its launch in 2009, more than 400 million Chinese have enrolled in the NRPS. We first describe plausible pathways through...

We assess the long-run growth effects of rising longevity and increasing the retirement age when growth is driven by purposeful research and development. In contrast to economies in which growth depends on learning-by-doing spillovers, raising the retirement age fosters economic growth. How...