Early Retirement, Labor Supply, and Benefit Withholding: The Role of the Social Security Earnings Test
Hugo Benitez-Silva and
Frank Heiland ()
Working Papers from University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center
Abstract:
The labor supply and benefit claiming incentives provided by the early retirement rules of the Social Security Old Age benefits program are of growing importance as the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) increases to 67, the labor force participation of Older Americans rises, and a variety of reforms to the Social Security system are considered. Any reform needs to take into account the effects and rationale of the Social Security Earnings Test and the Actuarial Adjustment Factor. We describe these incentives, and analyze benefit withholding patterns using data from the Master Beneficiary Files of the Social Security Administration, and present descriptive and exploratory evidence on the determinants of benefit withholding using data from the Health and Retirement Survey. We then investigate the importance of the Earnings Test limits for work and claiming behavior using a dynamic life-cycle model of labor supply, benefit claiming, and withholding. We use the latter framework to compare the consequences of a number of changes to the Earnings Test provision for the labor supply behavior and earnings of older Americans.
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2008-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp183.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp183.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp183.pdf)
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:mrr:papers:wp183
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MRRC Administrator ().