Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World – The Relationship to Youth Employment (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report) - Hardcover

Gruber, Jonathon; Wise, David A

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226309487 ISBN 13: 9780226309484

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Synopsis

Many countries have social security systems that are currently financially unsustainable. Economists and policy makers have long studied this problem and identified two key causes. First, as declining birth rates raise the share of older persons in the population, the ratio of retirees to benefits-paying employees increases. Second, as falling mortality rates increase lifespans, retirees receive benefits for longer than in the past. Further exacerbating the situation, the provisions of social security programs often provide strong incentives for people to leave the labor force. "Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World" offers comparative analysis from twelve countries and examines the issue of age in the labor force. A notable group of contributors analyzes the relationship between incentives to retire and the proportion of older persons in the workforce, the effects that reforming social security would have on the employment rates of older workers, and how extending labor force participation will affect program costs. Dispelling the myth that employing older workers takes jobs away from the young, this timely volume challenges a raft of existing assumptions about the relationship between old and young people in the workforce.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Gruber is professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Program on Health Care at the NBER, where he is a research associate. David A. Wise is the John F. Stambaugh Professor of Political Economy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is area director of the Health and Retirement programs, director of the Program on the Economics of Aging, and a research associate, all at the NBER.

From the Back Cover

"Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World" represents the second stage of an ongoing research project studying the relationship between social security and labor. In the first volume, Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise revealed enormous disincentives to continued work at older ages in developed countries. Provisions of many social security programs typically encourage retirement by reducing pay for work, inducing older employees to leave the labor force early and magnifying the financial burden caused by an aging population. At a certain age there is simply no financial benefit to continuing to work.In this volume, the authors turn to a country-by-country analysis of retirement behavior based on micro-data. The result of research compiled by teams in twelve countries, the volume shows an almost uniform correlation between levels of social security incentives and retirement behavior in each country. The estimates also show that the effect is strikingly uniform in countries with very different cultural histories, labor market institutions, and other social characteristics.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226309487
• ISBN 13: 9780226309484
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 376