The Retirement Effects of Old-Age Pension and Early Retirement Schemes in OECD Countries

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of old-age pension systems and other social transfer programmes on the retirement decision of older males in OECD countries. For each of the 55-59, 60-64 and 65+ age groups, a new panel dataset (22 OECD countries over 1969-1999 or shorter periods in some cases) of retirement incentives embedded in those schemes is constructed for an illustrative worker. The main focus is on the implicit tax rate on working for five more years, which sums up various dimensions of retirement incentives such as the pension accrual rate but also, to a lesser extent, the availability and generosity of benefits. There is currently wide dispersion across OECD countries in implicit tax rates on continued work embedded in old-age pension and early retirement schemes: they are high in most Continental European Countries, compared with Japan, Korea, English-speaking and Nordic countries. Simple cross-country correlations and panel data econometric estimates both show that ...