Over the last fifteen years, France has experienced a reversal of older workers' labor force participation and employment rates. Changes in health, life expectancy or education levels over the period are trend variables and thus cannot explain this “U-shaped” time profile. Pension reforms...

A popular view about social security, dating back to its early days of inception, is that it is a means for young, unemployed workers to 'purchase' jobs from older, employed workers. The question we ask is: Can social security, by encouraging retirement and hence creating job vacancies for the...

Most older workers retire completely from full-time work with no intervening spell of part-time work. This is incompatible with a model of retirement in which tastes for work gradually shift with age toward leisure and hours may be freely chosen. A survey of institutional arrangements such as...

This paper describes the development of population health and disability insurance utilization for older workers in Sweden and analyzes the relation between the two. We use three different measures of population health: (1) the mortality rate (measured between 1950 and 2009); (2) the prevalence...

In Lazear's (1979) model of efficient long-term incentive contracts, employers impose involuntary retirement based on age. This model implies that age discrimination laws, which bar involuntary terminations based on age, discourage the use of such contracts and reduce efficiency. Alternatively,...

This paper examines the labor market status of older males in the era of industrialization, focusing on the question of how the extent of pressure toward retirement varied across different occupations, and how it changed over time. A comparison of hazard of retirement across occupations shows...

This paper uses aggregate birth year/calendar year level data derived from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to estimate the effect of Social Security wealth on the labor supply of older men in the 1970s and 1980s. The analysis focuses on the 1977 amendments to the Social Security Act t which...

This study explores how technological, organizational, and managerial changes affected the labor-market status of older male manufacturing workers in early twentieth century America. Industrial characteristics that were favorably related to the labor-market status of older industrial workers...

This study estimates the labor force participation rate (LFPR) of older males in Korea from 1955 to 2005, and analyzes the effects of several determining factors on labor force participation decisions at older ages. The LFPR of older men increased substantially from the mid-1960s to the...

We provide evidence from a field experiment in all 50 states on age discrimination in hiring for retail sales jobs. We relate measured age discrimination – the difference in callback rates between old and young applicants – to state variation in anti-discrimination laws protecting older...