A fundamental question in personal finance is deciding when to retire. This article is a theoretical investigation within a conventional life-cycle setting. It finds two closed-form solutions to the retirement timing problem. One solution, based on an isoelastic form of the utility function and...

Post-retirement, the model in the main text (published in the Review of Economic Dynamics) reduces to the Merton (1969) problem, which has of course an exact solution. Pre-retirement, however, the agent holds an American option, namely, retire now or keep working. Problems involving American...

This study introduces a retirement decision into the class Merton model. A familiar result is that you should retire if and when the marginal utility of another year's wages is equal to the disutility of work.A new result is that at the point of retirement your exposure to risky assets should...