Cross-country variation in effective retirement age is usually attributed to institutional differences that affect individuals’ incentives to retire. This paper suggests a different approach to explain this variation. Since working individuals in different occupations naturally retire at...

What is the optimal retirement age? This paper looks at the optimal retirement age from various perspectives. Most of the current pension laws relating to retirement age were codified decades ago, and they have become badly out of date given what we now know about longevity, about health and...

We study the effects of the recent increase in the statutory retirement age (SRA) in the Netherlands, using RDD and rich administrative data on the universe of the Dutch population. We find large interaction effects with a preceding early retirement reform. The employment effect of the SRA...

Early retirement from the labour force has become standard practice for most employees in the industrialised world. However, as a result of the rising costs of early retirement schemes, curbing the outflow of older workers from the labour force has become a central policy objective. Early...

We examine the impact of a Finnish reform in the 1990s that restricted the use of particular early retirement channels, unemployment pension and individual early retirement, and simultaneously changed the rules of firm size related experience rating in disability pensions. Our emphasis is on how...

This paper uses panel data from the pan-European SHARE survey to study labor market behavior of older male self-employed visa-vis wage employed workers. We find the self-employed to work longer hours, to be more flexible in their hours allocation, and to retire later in all countries. We relate...

We estimate the causal effect of early retirement on mortality for blue-collar workers. To overcome the problem of endogenous selection, we exploit an exogenous change in unemployment insurance rules in Austria that allowed workers in eligible regions to withdraw from the workforce up to 3.5...

In this study we gauge the impact of social interactions on individual retirement preferences. A survey including self-assessments and vignette questions shows that individual preferences are affected by preferences and actual retirement behavior of the social environment. Retirement from paid...

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...

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...