 Does the dismantlement of early retirement schemes increase unemployment in Belgium ?No 2008041, Discussion Papers (ECON - Département des Sciences Economiques) from Université catholique de Louvain, Département des Sciences Economiques Abstract: Early retirement is often explained as resulting from a voluntary labour supply choice of a utility maximizing individual. nonetheless, a lof of individuals perceive retirement as a forced instead as a voluntary decision. This paper tries to accomodate voluntary and unvoluntary labour supply decisions within one model. On the basis of a large administrative dataset merged with Census data, we estimate a discrete-time competing risk model of transitions from Belgian private-sector employees into unemployment, early and old-age retirement while accounting for forward-looking retirement incentives. The estimated coefficients are used to simulate a cut in early retirement benefits. Although this could enhance the financial sustainability of the social security system for elderly, one might expect that this may ofrce people to retire involuntarily through elderly unemployment where they end up with a lower living standard or even in poverty. Alternatively, it could stimulate employees to work longer until they qualify for old-age pension benefits. The model predicts a strong increase of the exit rates towards unemployment between age 52 and 57 while exit towards the old-age pension system marginally increases until age 63. In particular, blue-collars with physically demanding jobs in traditional industries have a higher risk to become unemployed while white-collar workers, members of voluntary saving plans or occupational pension schemes and highly educated workers are predicted to move in the old-age pension system. Keywords: competing-risk model; early retirement; retirement pathways; involuntary retirement (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvec:2008041 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Discussion Papers (ECON - Département des Sciences Economiques) from Université catholique de Louvain, Département des Sciences Economiques Place Montesquieu 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC. |
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