What Triggers Early Retirement. Results from Swiss Pension Funds

Monika Bütler (), Olivia Huguenin and Federica Teppa
Additional contact information
Olivia Huguenin: deep–HEC, Université de Lausanne

No 35, CeRP Working Papers from Center for Research on Pensions and Welfare Policies, Turin (Italy)

Abstract: Early retirement is predominantly considered as the result of incentives set by social security and the tax system. But people seem to retire early even in the absence of such distortions as the Swiss example demonstrates. We look for determinants of early retirement, in particular the role of lifetime income and family status, using individual data from a selection of Swiss pension funds. Our ?ndings suggest that affordability is a key determinant in retirement decisions: More affuent men, and — to a much smaller extent — women, tend to leave the work force earlier. The fact that early retirement has become much more prevalent in the last 15 years is another indicator for the importance of affordability as Switzerland’s funded pension system has matured over that period leading to higher effective replacement rates. We also ?nd sizeable differences in retirement behavior across marital status. These may be explained by a constrained rational choice based on differential mortality and the desire of couples to coordinate their entry into retirement.

Keywords: Occupational Pension; Retirement decision; Duration models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2004-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cerp.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/WP_35.pdf?d2641f First version, 2004 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What Triggers Early Retirement? Results from Swiss Pension Funds (2004)
Working Paper: What Triggers Early Retirement ? Results from Swiss Pension Funds (2004)
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:crp:wpaper:35

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CeRP Working Papers from Center for Research on Pensions and Welfare Policies, Turin (Italy) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Silvia Maero ().