For decades, policymakers have discussed how to remedy the high poverty rates of older widows. Yet older divorced women are more likely to be poor than older widows, and historical divorce and remarriage trends suggest that in the future a larger share of retired women will be divorced. This...

The paper presents the concept of the "silver economy" as an economic system related to population aging and underlines the features of this policy idea. The study first introduces the discourse and stages of constructing this system by international and national public policy actors in aging....

This paper adds to the empirical literature on health as an important determinant of employment at older ages by exploring the role in the health-employment nexus of the wage rates of 50 to 64-year-old workers. To do so, we use individual-level panel data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and...

The aging of the U.S. population will be a critical public policy issue in the years ahead. This paper surveys the recent literature on the economics of aging, with a special emphasis on government spending on the aged. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that the proportion of the elderly in the...

When private transfers respond endogenously to the retirement decision of the elderly, they directly lower the opportunity cost of not working and magnify the income effect of public transfers. In this paper we show that the interaction of private transfers with the labor market decision of the...

The tendency for public welfare spending to be increasingly aimed at the elderly has been pointed out for the US and other developed countries. While population ageing is a common trend, it is not obvious why the shift in spending exceeds the trend in ageing, or why per capita spending on the...

This paper revisits trends in the level and distribution of income among Canadian seniors in is arguably the major source of change in these trends since the end of the seventies, the maturation of Canada's public and private earnings-related pension systems. The expanded role of...

This paper exploits Social Security law changes to identify the effect of Social Security income on the use of formal and informal home care by the elderly. Results from an instrumental variables estimation strategy show that as retirement income increases, elderly individuals increase their use...

Retirement Study? This article uses household wealth and labor market data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to investigate how the recent "Great Recession" has affected the wealth and retirement of those approaching retirement age as the recession began, a potentially vulnerable...

We study the retirement effects on mental health using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design based on the eligibility age to the state pension in the Netherlands. We find that the mental effects are heterogeneous by gender and marital status. Retirement of partnered men positively affects...