This paper shows that increasing the normal retirement age and introducing pension deductions for retirement before normal retirement age in Germany did not prolong employment of older men. The reason for this surprising result is that employers encouraged their employees to use the bridge...

We document considerable heterogeneity in the fraction of older workers across occupations, and show that this is related to occupational characteristics. For example, occupations that have larger fractions of older workers tend to be less physically demanding and more cognitively demanding....