Retirement Incentives and Expectations
Retirement Incentives and Expectations

Author: Sewin Chan

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 31

ISBN-13:

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This paper investigates the responsiveness of individuals' retirement expectations to forward-looking measures of pension wealth accumulations. While most of the existing literature on retirement has used cross-sectional variation to identify the effects of pension and Social Security wealth on retirement behavior, we estimate fixed-effects regressions to control for unobserved heterogeneity that might be correlated with retirement plans and wealth. As expected, we find significant effects of future pension wealth accumulations on retirement expectations, but the magnitude of these effects differs substantially between OLS and fixed-effects estimation. Coefficients from fixed-effects estimation are at most half the magnitude of similar OLS regressions. Our results point to potentially large biases from the failure to control for unobserved heterogeneity in empirical models of retirement-related outcomes

Retirement
Retirement

Author: Gary A. Adams, PhD

Publisher: Springer Publishing Company

Published: 2003-08-11

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 082619737X

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This book reviews, summarizes, and integrates a diverse literature on the topic of retirement and provides a coherent view to better inform researchers and practitioners. Organized around three phases of the retirement process--pre-retirement, retirement decision-making, and post-retirement--the chapters examine economic, sociological, gerontological, and psychological theory and research. Topics discussed include: types of retirement, retirement planning and preparation, early retirement incentive programs, the economics of the retirement decision-making, and work after retirement, among others. Contributors include Jerome Kaplan, Kenneth Shultz, Harvey Sterns, and Linda Stroh.

Assessing Knowledge of Retirement Behavior
Assessing Knowledge of Retirement Behavior

Author: Panel on Retirement Income Modeling

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 1996-08-13

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0309589533

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This book brings together in one volume what researchers have learned about workers, employers, and retirees that is important for formulating retirement income policies. As the U.S. population ages, there is increasing uncertainty about the solvency of the Social Security and Medicare systems and the adequacy of private pensions to provide for people's retirement needs. The volume covers such critical behaviors as workers' decisions to retire, people's choices of saving over consumption, and employers' decisions about hiring older workers and providing pension and health care benefits. Also covered are trends in mortality, health status, and health care costs that are key to projecting the likely costs and effects of alternative retirement income security policies and a strategy for combining data and research knowledge into a policy modeling framework.

Aging and the Macroeconomy
Aging and the Macroeconomy

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2013-01-10

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0309261961

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The United States is in the midst of a major demographic shift. In the coming decades, people aged 65 and over will make up an increasingly large percentage of the population: The ratio of people aged 65+ to people aged 20-64 will rise by 80%. This shift is happening for two reasons: people are living longer, and many couples are choosing to have fewer children and to have those children somewhat later in life. The resulting demographic shift will present the nation with economic challenges, both to absorb the costs and to leverage the benefits of an aging population. Aging and the Macroeconomy: Long-Term Implications of an Older Population presents the fundamental factors driving the aging of the U.S. population, as well as its societal implications and likely long-term macroeconomic effects in a global context. The report finds that, while population aging does not pose an insurmountable challenge to the nation, it is imperative that sensible policies are implemented soon to allow companies and households to respond. It offers four practical approaches for preparing resources to support the future consumption of households and for adapting to the new economic landscape.

Economic Incentives to Retire
Economic Incentives to Retire

Author: Olivia S. Mitchell

Publisher:

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13:

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This paper addresses two questions:(1) Are older persons' retirement ages significantly affected by the opportunities for income from earnings,private pensions, and Social Security and for leisure at alternative retirement ages?; and (2) How large are the estimated responses? Our approach to modeling the retirement problem is a forward-looking one, in which the explanatory variables include present discounted values of expected lifetime income from earnings, private pensions, and Social Security at all future retirement ages. Such data have been constructed using a unique archive on 390 workers covered by a large union pension plan. A previous paper (Fieldsand Mitchell, 1982) used these data to show that retirement ages are significantly associated with the present discounted value of income at age 60, and with the gain in income from deferring retirement. The current paper develops two different qualitative choice models of the retirement decision. We find: retirement ages do indeed respond significantly to future income and leisure opportunities; an ordered logit model is more suited to the data than is a multinomial logit model; and the estimated responses to changes in future income opportunities differ across model specifications, where the preferred ordered logit model exhibits larger estimated responses.

The Timing of Retirement
The Timing of Retirement

Author: B. Douglas Bernheim

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 27

ISBN-13:

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In this paper, I employ data drawn from the Social Security Administration's Retirement History Survey (RHS) to study the accuracy of expectations concerning the timing of retirement. The RHS is ideally suited for this purpose, in that it collects information on retirement plans, and follows respondents through time so that one can identify actual dates of retirement. The data are consistent with the view that, when asked to report an expected date of retirement, individuals name the most likely date (i.e. a mode, rather than a mean). Furthermore, these forecasts are highly accurate. There is very little evidence that individuals' expectations were systematically biased during periods in which Congress legislated large real increases in social security benefits. This suggests either that the benefit increaser were anticipated, or that unanticipated changes in benefits have little effect on retirement. The paper also describes differences in the accuracy of expectations by population subgroup.

How Do the Elderly Form Expectations?
How Do the Elderly Form Expectations?

Author: B. Douglas Bernheim

Publisher:

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13:

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In this paper, I outline and test a simple theory that describes the evolution of expectations concerning social security benefits during the pre-retirement period. After correcting for the presences of measurement error, I obtain results that are consistent with this theory: expectations appear to evolve as a random walk, and innovations in this process are unrelated to previously available information. I also estimate responses of expectations to the arrival of new information. Although previous research indicates that individuals do not form expectations on the basis of all available information (and in particular ignore much of the information contained in concurrent statutory entitlements to social security benefits), responses to new information during the period immediately preceding retirement appear to be highly rational. The bulk of information affects the evolution of expectations only through its impact on actual benefit calculations. Furthermore, the data support the view that individuals form accurate assessments of the ultimate impact of new information on actual benefits.