Early retirement schemes and disability insurance in the Netherlands have both been reformed during the past decades. The reforms have increased incentives to continue working and have decreased the substitution between early retirement and disability. This study investigates the impact of the...

In this study we gauge the impact of social interactions on individual retirement preferences. A survey including self-assessments and vignette questions shows that individual preferences are affected by preferences and actual retirement behavior of the social environment. Retirement from paid...

Flexible retirement - that is the opportunity to choose one’s own personal retirement age - serves as a hedge against pension risk and provides insurance to workers facing health or productivity shocks. Flexible retirement and flexible pension schemes are in practice closely linked because of...

We study the causal relation between private wealth and retirement age. We propose two estimation strategies based on expected retirement age. The outcome variable is observed repeatedly over time. We correct first for the unobserved heterogeneity in the disutility of work by using panel data...

This paper investigates the impact of financial incentives on early retirement behaviour for high and low wage earners. Using a stylized life-cycle model, we derive hypotheses on the behaviour of the two types. We use administrative data and employ two identification strategies to test the...

In this study, we investigate the anatomy of older workers' wages. The central question is whether the wage cushion — i.e., the difference between actual wages and collectively agreed-upon (maximum) contractual wages — contributes to the fact that wages continue increasing at older ages. We...

The second-largest pension fund in the Netherlands, the health care sector fund PFZW (former PGGM), placed the administrative records of its participants for 1999 to 2007 at the disposal of Statistics Netherlands. The data contain precise information on pension and early retirement rights and...