This paper seeks to gain insights on the relationship between growth and unemployment, when considering heterogeneous agents in terms of age. We introduce life cycle features in the endogenous job destruction framework à la Mortensen and Pissarides (1998). We show that, under the assumption of...

Several studies show that employees with firm-specific skills are more likely to be covered by employer-sponsored pension schemes than workers with general skills. Therefore it can be expected that workers with firm-specific skills retire earlier. This paper tests this prediction using US data...

Utilizing a new survey of employers, this paper examines how and why establishments differ in their willingness to permit an older full-time white-collar worker to take phased retirement. Phased retirement means that an older worker remains with his or her employer while gradually reducing work...

This paper uses a telephone survey of 950 employers to examine employer-side restrictions on phased retirement. Not only did the survey collect information on establishment level policies, it also asked questions about a specific worker’s opportunity for phased retirement. The paper uses these...

The debate about mandatory retirement is fundamentally a moral issue, about human rights, but one strongly related to several major economic issues. Mandatory retirement is a form of age discrimination that seems to be strictly prohibited by section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights. But...

This paper examines retirement and related behavioral responses to policies that on average are actuarially neutral. Many conventional models predict that actuarially neutral policies will not affect retirement behavior. In contrast, our model allows those with high time preference rates to find...

This paper uses the receipt of an inheritance to measure the effect of wealth shocks on retirement. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we first document that inheritance receipt is common among older workers %u2013 one in five households receives an inheritance over an eight-year...

This paper specifies and estimates a structural dynamic stochastic model of the way individuals make retirement and saving choices in an uncertain world, and applies that model to analyze the effects of the stock market bubble on retirement behavior. The model includes individual variation both...

Together, pensions, social security and health insurance account for half of the wealth held by all households in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), for 60 percent of total wealth of HRS households who are in the 45th to 55th wealth percentiles, and even for 48 percent of wealth for those in...

A structural retirement model estimated with data from the Health and Retirement Study is used to simulate the effects of policies firms might adopt to improve employment conditions for older workers and thereby encourage delayed retirement. Firm policies that effectively abolished minimum hours...