Delays in Claiming Social Security Benefits

Courtney Coile, Peter Diamond, Jonathan Gruber and Alain Jousten

No 7318, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper focuses on Social Security benefit claiming behavior, a take-up decision that has been ignored in the previous literature. Using financial calculations and simulations based on an expected utility maximization model, we show that delaying benefit claim for a period of time after retirement is optimal in a wide variety of cases and that gains from delay may be significant. We find that approximately 10% of men retiring before their 62nd birthday delay claiming for at least one year after eligibility. We estimate hazard and probit models using data from the New Beneficiary Data System to test four cross-sectional predictions. While the data suggest that too few men delay, we find that the pattern of delays by early retirees is generally consistent with the hypotheses generated by our theoretical model.

JEL-codes: H3 H5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-08
Note: AG LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Published as Coile, Courtney, Peter Diamond, Jonathan Gruber and Alan Jousten. "Delays In Claiming Social Security Benefits," Journal of Public Economics, 2002, v84(3,Jun), 357-385.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7318.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Delays in claiming social security benefits (2002)
Working Paper: Delays in claiming social security benefits (2000)
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:7318

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7318

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 ().