Despite substantial increases in longevity, the age of retirement in the industrialized countries has steadily fallen throughout most of the 20th century. In 13 OECD countries, the employment-population ratio of 55-64-year-old males fell by an average of more than 12 percentage points between...

The withdrawal of older workers from the labor force creates a variety of economic challenges, including an increase in unused production capacity. Costs due to early retirement measured in terms of forgone output averaged 6.3 percent of potential gross domestic product in the OECD in 1998....

This paper deals with two policy approaches to address the problem of the "pensions time bomb" by influencing private-sector pension provision. In assessing the role of private-sector pensions, it is common to concentrate exclusively on the issue of whether early retirement penalties or late...

The paper examines the following pension reform strategy that aims to defuse the pension time-bomb without giving rise to intergenerational conflict. Let people with rights to public pensions have the option of using a portion of their potential pensions to provide employment vouchers for...