We use administrative data from Oregon's Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) to study the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement-timing decisions. During our 1990–2003 sample period, PERS calculates each member's retirement benefit using up to three different...

This paper presents the results of a field experiment in which a sample of older workers was randomized between a treatment group that was given information about key Social Security provisions and a control group that was not. The experiment was designed to examine whether it is possible to...

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to explore the mechanism that underlies the robust relation found in the literature between cognitive ability, and in particular numeracy, and wealth, income constant. We have a number of findings. First, the more valuable the pension,...

This paper presents new evidence on how the annuitization decision is affected by changes in the annuity's value. We take advantage of an unprecendented change in policy, which in 2004 moderated the super-mandatory Swiss occupational pension scheme: The 20 percent reduction in the rate at which...

Many countries are including personal retirement accounts (PRAs) as part of their social security systems. PRA systems boost private savings at the macro level by converting a government financial liability into private wealth. At the micro level, however, crowing-out effects on household...

This paper examines retirement behavior and household income for older persons in Chile. It pays close attention to the sources of household income, income inequalities, and the economic vulnerability of older persons. This is important in order to evaluate whether labour market and social...

William B.P. Robson, a co-author with David Slater of a series of papers on pension issues, has written an ambitious survey of the state of Canadian economic policy in the areas of pensions and health care. He argues that it is appropriate to tackle both issues in the same paper because they are...

We investigate induced retirement effects of the Norwegian early retirement program "AFP" and emphasizes effects caused by relocations of some individuals from disability pension and unemploy,emt to AFP. Our theoretical model predicts that AFP unembiguously induces more early retirement.

It has been shown in economic research that public pay-as-you-go defined-benefit pension plans penalize those who continue to work beyond a certain age by reducing the present discounted value of future retirement benefits. In discussions on the effectiveness of policies aimed at eliminating...

In order to estimate labour supply responses among older people we have employed a very simple model of retirement decisions that can be estimated on a single cross-section sample, and still be given a structural interpretation in terms of inter-temporal decisions. The model is estimated on...