Health and retirement: Heterogeneity in the responsiveness to pension incentives

Abstract

Workers often time retirement around pension eligibility, yielding a strong instrument for retirement timing. By estimating the characteristics of the complier population, we find heterogeneity by individual health status in the responsiveness to pension-related financial incentives to retire. Workers in poor health do not uniformly retire earlier or later, but rather are less responsive overall to pension incentives. Thus, characterizing compliers may yield different conclusions than simple comparisons of means.