Flexible retirement - that is the opportunity to choose one’s own personal retirement age - serves as a hedge against pension risk and provides insurance to workers facing health or productivity shocks. Flexible retirement and flexible pension schemes are in practice closely linked because of...

We use a recent policy change in the Netherlands to study how changes in search requirements for the older unemployed affect their transition rates to employment, early retirement and sickness/disability benefits. The reform, becoming effective on January 1st 2004, requires the elderly to...

Unemployment insurance recipients in the Netherlands were for a long time exempted from the requirement to actively search for a job when they reached the age of 57.5. We study how this exemption affected the job finding rates of the recipients involved. We find evidence that the job finding...

This paper studies the labor supply effects of a national delayed retirement policy introduced in 2009 in the Netherlands. The policy offers a reduction in taxes on labor income over each year in which retirement is delayed after the age of 62. I estimate the average effect of the policy on male...

Job satisfaction of shifters into self-employment informs us about their risk of social exclusion. Those who shift into self-employment are the more motivated wage-employed seeking higher job satisfaction. Social exclusion is not a likely outcome to those who shift into self-employment....

This study examines the causal effect of being socially active on old age cognition, using harmonized data from 18 European countries. We handle the endogeneity of social participation via nonparametric partial identification methods that bound the average treatment effect while using fairly...

Americans' indebtedness increased dramatically since the 1980s — a trend likely to have important implications for retirement security. On one hand, higher indebtedness might compel individuals to keep working and delay Social Security benefit claiming so they can pay off their financial...

This study examines the sensitivity of the retirement age decision to standard retirement ages in pension overviews (age anchors) with a self‐constructed survey. Individuals retire later when they are confronted with a higher age anchor. Specifically, their retirement age corresponds to the...

Increasing individual working lives to counter population ageing and public pension deficits is of utmost interest to policy makers today. Because over 70 percent of older individuals live in a couple, it is relevant to investigate spouses' retirement strategies. Earlier literature in this area...

This paper analyzes the effect of retirement on cognitive functioning using two large scale surveys. First, a longitudinal survey among older Americans allows controlling for individual heterogeneity and endogeneity of the retirement decision. Second, a cross-national European survey allows...