This study documents an important role for Social Security income in workers' retirement timing. About 40 percent of public school teachers are not covered by Social Security. This provides an opportunity to analyze the causal impact of Social Security on retirement timing by comparing covered...

The paper traces labor market reforms over the last four decades. It provides estimates of retirement incentives for a selected set of typical worker profiles across time and socioeconomic groups and links these series to the labor market performance in Belgium. The results show that the...

In this paper, we analyze the association between financial incentives and retirement decisions using aggregate data for over four decades in Spain. We calculate an implicit tax rate on remaining in employment for an additional year and examine its correlation with employment rates for older...

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...

There have been a vast number of social security reforms aimed at increasing employment at older ages over the last two decades in the Netherlands. These reforms mainly lead to more stringent eligibility criteria for, and reduced generosity of, social security programs. Our empirical evidence...

We examine how the change in the trend of the elderly's employment rates has been associated with changes in incentives of social security and its related programs in Japan since the 1980s. We compute the tax force to retire early, using the institutional parameters and synthetic earnings...

This paper estimates the effect of relaxing the social insurance mandate on entrepreneurial activity. We use a unique discontinuity in Finland that allows certain entrepreneurs not to pay social insurance contributions on their income. Using rich administrative data, we find that relaxing the...

This paper uses the Auerbach-Kotlikoff Dynamic Life-Cycle Model (AK Model) to examine the macroeconomic and efficiency effects of privatizing social security, and a simple privatization proposal, the Personal Security System, to discuss other issues associated with privatization. According to...

The social security program will pay benefits of more than $100 billion in 1978. Public transfers on this scale are large enough to have profound effects on the behavior of the U.S. economy. The most important effect, although not the only one, is likely to be the impact of social security on...

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...