This is the introduction and summary to the fifth 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...

This paper deals with the effects of labor and transfer incomes as determinants of older women's labor force participation. It examines the responsiveness of women aged 48-62 to the level of income available from both work and public transfer programs when deciding between work and nonwork...

This paper uses asset and labor market data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to investigate how the recent "Great Recession" has affected the wealth and retirement of those in the population who were just approaching retirement age at the beginning of the recession, a potentially...

This paper describes the development of population health and disability insurance utilization for older workers in Sweden and analyzes the relation between the two. We use three different measures of population health: (1) the mortality rate (measured between 1950 and 2009); (2) the prevalence...

This paper presents information on labor market participation of the elderly, mortality and health, pathways to retirement and rates of participation in various earnings replacing programs in the Netherlands. It presents an overview of reforms to Disability Insurance (DI) and other income...

This paper utilizes historical information to explore the relationship between labor force participation of middle aged and old people and the disability program in Japan. In particular, we explore the time series dimension to identify what has determined the trend in disability program...

Over the last thirty years pathways to retirement have changed substantially in the UK. They have been dominated by spells of unemployment in the late 1970s, with then an increased importance of disability spells from the mid-1980s onwards. At the end of the period the direct route from work to...

Public programs that benefit older individuals, such as Social Security and Medicare, may be changed in the future in ways that reflect an expectation of longer work lives. But do older Americans have the health capacity to work longer? This paper explores this question by asking how much older...

In this paper, I survey the previous literature on the saving behavior of the aged in Japan and then present some survey data on the saving behavior of the aged in Japan that became available recently. To summarize the main findings of this paper, all previous studies as well as the newly...

We show how the economic incentives to remain in the labor force induced by Sweden's public old-age pension system and disability insurance program have changed between 1980 and 2015. Based on earnings histories for different hypothetical individuals corresponding to groups by gender and...