Policy makers have often argued that an additional benefit of facilitating early retirement is that it creates employment for the young. This may happen if older and younger workers are substitutes. Nowadays policy makers’ goals are to discourage early retirement to counter the economic...

This paper assesses the impact of a dramatic reform of the Dutch pension system on mental health, savings behavior and retirement expectations of workers nearing retirement age. The reform means that public sector workers born on January 1, 1950 or later face a substantial reduction in their...

This study examines the causal effect of being socially active on old age cognition, using harmonized data from 18 European countries. We handle the endogeneity of social participation via nonparametric partial identification methods that bound the average treatment effect while using fairly...

The share of the older workers in the labor force has increased due to population aging and pension reforms in many countries. However, rules of the public and private pension schemes and restrictions from the employers still require large populations of older workers with possibly heteregeneous...

Increasing individual working lives to counter population ageing and public pension deficits is of utmost interest to policy makers today. Because over 70 percent of older individuals live in a couple, it is relevant to investigate spouses' retirement strategies. Earlier literature in this area...

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...

Americans' indebtedness increased dramatically since the 1980s — a trend likely to have important implications for retirement security. On one hand, higher indebtedness might compel individuals to keep working and delay Social Security benefit claiming so they can pay off their financial...

This study examines the sensitivity of the retirement age decision to standard retirement ages in pension overviews (age anchors) with a self‐constructed survey. Individuals retire later when they are confronted with a higher age anchor. Specifically, their retirement age corresponds to the...

This paper investigates whether employers can induce employees to postpone retirement by offering access to training courses that maintain job proficiency. We use unique, matched employer-employee surveys for the Dutch public sector, which include detailed information on a wide range of HR...

Life expectancies are rapidly increasing and uncertain in all countries in Europe. To keep pension systems affordable, policy reforms are to be implemented which will encourage individuals to work longer and that adjust pension systems such that if life expectancy increases without adjustments...