Will They Take the Money and Work? An Empirical Analysis of People's Willingness to Delay Claiming Social Security Benefits for a Lump Sum

Raimond Maurer, Olivia Mitchell, Ralph Rogalla and Tatjana Schimetschek

No 20614, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper investigates whether exchanging the Social Security delayed retirement credit (currently paid as an increase in lifetime annuity benefits) for a lump sum would induce later claiming and additional work. We show that people would voluntarily claim about half a year later if the lump sum were paid for claiming any time after the Early Retirement Age, and about two-thirds of a year later if the lump sum were paid only for those claiming after their Full Retirement Age. Overall, people will work one-third to one-half of the additional months, compared to the status quo. Those who would currently claim at the youngest ages are likely to be most responsive to the offer of a lump sum benefit.

JEL-codes: D04 D1 D12 D14 G22 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-lab and nep-lma
Note: AG LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20614.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Will they take the money and work? An empirical analysis of people's willingness to delay claiming social security benefits for a lump sum (2015)
Working Paper: Will They Take the Money and Work? An Empirical Analysis of People’s Willingness to Delay Claiming Social Security Benefits for a Lump Sum (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20614

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20614

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().