Flexible or mandatory retirement? Welfare implications of retirement policies for a population with heterogeneous health conditions

Zhenhua Feng, Jaimie W. Lien and Jie Zheng

International Review of Economics & Finance, 2020, vol. 69, issue C, 1032-1055

Abstract: A flexible retirement policy has often been proposed as a solution to address the social dilemma of individuals in the population having different desired retirement ages. We analyze such a policy in an overlapping generations general equilibrium framework, where individuals differ in terms of their health condition at the standard retirement age, and therefore in their suitability for remaining in the labor force beyond the standard age. In our model, workers know about their future health condition when they are young, and adjust their savings and labor supply accordingly in order to maximize their lifetime utility. The applies to situations in which workers can fairly accurately predict their health status based upon personal, family, community and professional health status tendencies. We compare the flexible retirement policy to the mandatory retirement policy in the labor and capital markets, and the effects on savings and wages in the aggregate for both healthy and unhealthy, young and elderly cohorts. For economies with sufficiently high capital intensity of production and high levels health among the elderly, a flexible retirement policy can result in a welfare reduction compared to a mandatory retirement policy. Our study links the social desirability of the two retirement policies to the technological and population structure of the economy.

Keywords: Retirement policy; Welfare economics; Overlapping generations; Demographic trends; Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H3 I1 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1059056018310785
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:reveco:v:69:y:2020:i:c:p:1032-1055

DOI: 10.1016/j.iref.2018.12.011

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Economics & Finance is currently edited by H. Beladi and C. Chen

More articles in International Review of Economics & Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().