Early retirement eligibility and employment behavior: evidence from a cohort based pension reform

Clara Welteke, Johannes Geyer and Peter Haan

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: This paper analyzes the employment effects of a major pension reform in Germany using cohort discontinuities. In particular, we focus on the abolition of an early retirement option for women. Up until cohort 1951 women could draw old-age pensions starting with age 60. Women born after 1951 no longer had this opportunity. The eligibility age for early retirement was increased to 63. We exploit this reform in a regression discontinuity framework to study the effects on employment and program substitution. Our preliminary results suggest that the increase in the eligibility age for early retirement increased employment rates of older women. Remarkably, we do not find any significant spillover effects into alternative paths to exit the labor force. On the contrary, we find negative effects on reduced earnings capacity pension participation rates, and small insignificant effects on the unemployment rate of 60 year-old women. Furthermore, we find negative effects on social security program participation of women in their late 50s.

JEL-codes: J14 J22 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Closing Routes to Retirement: How Do People Respond? (2017)
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:zbw:vfsc16:145783

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().