Income Security Programmes and Retirement Behaviour in Ireland

Roman Raab and Brenda Gannon

No 157, Working Papers from National University of Ireland Galway, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper gives a first-time assessment of the interaction between income security programmes (public and private) and the labour force behaviour of older people in Ireland. Workers close to retirement age face a trade-off between earnings from continued work and benefit payments from income security programmes (public and private). Using the methodology portrayed in Gruber and Wise (1999), we simulate the long-term payoffs arising from these programmes, i.e. income security wealth, its accrual, and the tax on work for stylised cases in Ireland. We find that income security programmes in Ireland are an important feature of the opportunity set for older workers planning their retirement. Our results highlight the important variation in the Irish retirement system and hence it is difficult to draw general conclusions. Nonetheless, our results are innovative and an original contribution to pension policy in Ireland. Half the workforce depends on public old-age income provision only and we find that this system embeds important financial signals for early retirement. We find that people depending on public state pension only have incentives to retire, especially for low earners. For people who also have an occupational pension, the incentive to retire early is much stronger.

Keywords: Social security and public pensions; time allocation and labour supply; retirement; retirement policies Algorithmic Trading; MACD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H55 J22 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2010, Revised 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics.nuig.ie/resrch/paper.php?pid=164 First version, 2010 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found
http://www.economics.nuig.ie/resrch/paper.php?pid=164 Revised version, 2010 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:nig:wpaper:0157

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from National University of Ireland Galway, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Srinivas Raghavendra ().