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This is the introduction and summary to the ninth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. This project, which compares the experiences of a dozen developed countries, was launched in the mid 1990s, following decades of decline in the labor force participation rate of older men. The first several phases of the project document that social security program provisions can create powerful incentives for retirement that are strongly correlated with the labor force behavior of older workers. Subsequent phases have explored how disability program provisions affect retirement, whether there is a link between older employment and youth unemployment, and whether older individuals are healthy enough to work longer. In the two decades since the project began, the dramatic decline in men's labor force participation has been replaced by sharply rising participation rates. Older women's participation has increased dramatically as well. Over this same period, countries have undertaken numerous reforms of their social security programs, disability programs, and other public benefit programs available to older workers. In this ninth phase of the project, we explore how the financial incentive to work at older ages has evolved from 1980 to the present. We highlight the important role of reforms in these changing incentives and examine how changing incentives may have affected retirement behavior.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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This paper studies the interrelated roles of health and welfare state policies in the decision to take up disability insurance (DI) benefits due to work disability (WD), defined as the (partial) inability to engage in gainful employment due to physical or mental illness. We exploit the large international variation of health, self-reported WD and the uptake of DI benefits in the US and Europe using a harmonized data set with life history information assembled from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing (ELSA) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Particular attention is given to the role of life-time health and other life-time experiences in explaining WD and DI uptake later in life. We find that while our large set of health measures explains a substantial share of the within-country variation in WD and DI, this is not the case for the variation across countries. Rather, most of the variation between countries is explained by differences in DI policies.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie