We study the effects of public pension systems on the retirement timing of older workers and, in turn, the health consequences of delaying retirement by those workers. Causal inference relies on a social security reform in Israel that shifted payments from husbands to their (non-working) wives,...

Long-term increases in life expectancy have varied for individuals with different lifetime earnings levels. This article examines two hypothetical adjustments to Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance benefits that would offset the differential changes in projected life expectancy. The...

The costs of providing care informally at home to frail elderly persons can be substantial, especially if caregivers are forced to interrupt their careers or retire early when they provide care. This report describes findings from a recent Urban Institute study of the characteristics of persons...

This research analyses retirement behaviour in Austria based on a combined administrative dataset. Data from the Austrian social security database is merged with a dataset that contains very detailed information on all pension-relevant information on the individual level, e.g. insurance records...

About 5 million state and local government workers, including 1.2 million public school teachers concentrated in 15 states, are not enrolled in Social Security. In order to ensure that those workers receive adequate benefits, Congress requires state and local government employers to offer...

In 2008, the oldest of 78 million baby boomers will celebrate their 62nd birthdays. Before they blow out their birthday candles, they will have considered and likely decided whether to elect to take early Social Security retirement benefits (SSRBs). Recent and evolving changes in the normal...

This is the introduction and summary to the fifth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement Incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social...

In this paper, I analyze the crowding-out effects of public transfers on labor supply of the elderly in the context of developing countries. I argue that the interactions between private transfers received and labor supplied by the elderly affect the opportunity cost of retirement and,...

This paper investigates whether exchanging the Social Security delayed retirement credit, currently paid as an increase in lifetime annuity benefits, for a lump sum would induce later claiming and additional work. We show that people would voluntarily claim about half a year later if the lump...

Many Americans claim Social Security benefits early, though this leaves them with lower benefits throughout retirement. We build a lifecycle model that closely tracks claiming patterns under current rules, and we use it to predict claiming delays if, by delaying benefits, people received a lump...