Does retirement represent a state of relative prosperity or a time of unanticipated economic hardship? To assess whether individuals are successful in smoothing their well-being across the transition to retirement we analyse measures of relative subjective wellbeing (SWB) in the Australian HILDA...

Identifying the effect of the financial incentives created by social security systems on the retirement behaviour of individuals requires exogenous variation in program parameters. In this paper we study the 1993 Australian Age Pension reform which increased the eligibility age for women to...

A substantial body of international research has shown that household expenditure on food and non-durables significantly decreases at the time of retirement -- a finding that is inconsistent with the standard life-cycle model of consumption if retirement is an anticipated event. This fall in...