Retirement Age across Countries: The Role of Occupations

Philip Sauré and Hosny Zoabi

No 2012-06, Working Papers from Swiss National Bank

Abstract: Cross-country variation in average retirement age is usually attributed to institutional differences that affect individuals' incentives to retire. We suggest a different approach. Since workers in different occupations naturally retire at different ages, the composition of occupations within an economy matters for its average retirement age. Using U.S. data we infer the average retirement age by occupation, which we then use to predict the retirement age of 38 countries according to the occupational composition of these countries. Our findings suggest that the differences in occupational composition explain up to 39.2% of the observed cross-country variation in retirement age.

Keywords: Retirement Age; Occupational Distribution; Cross-Country Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J14 J24 J26 J82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.snb.ch/en/publications/research/workin ... orking_paper_2012_06 (text/html)

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:snb:snbwpa:2012-06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Swiss National Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Enzo Rossi ().