The Effect of Social Security, Health, Demography and Technology on Retirement

Marcelo Santos and Pedro Ferreira

No 903, 2011 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This article investigates the causes in the reduction of labor force participation of the old. We argue that the changes in social security policy and in technology, and the introduction of Medicare may account for most of the changes in retirement over the second part of the last century in the U.S. economy. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous retirement that embeds social security legislation and Medicare. The model is able to match very closely the increase in the retirement rate of American males and also to reproduce many stylized facts, such as retirement rate by age, by health status and income. We find that changes in social security policy - that became much more generous - account for a sizeable part of the expansion aggregate retirement rate (45% of the observed increase). They also explain, together with Medicare, most of the variation of the retirement profile by age. We found that wealth shocks can influence retirement behavior, so that the strong run-up in stock market in the nineties may have affected the decision of older workers to leave the labor force

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2011/paper_903.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Effect of Social Security, Health, Demography and Technology on Retirement (2013)
Working Paper: The effect of social security, health, demography and technology on retirement (2012)
Working Paper: The Effect of Social Security, Health, Demography and Technology on Retirement (2012)
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:red:sed011:903

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2011 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann (chuichuiche@gmail.com).