Abstract:This paper provides an overview of the Swedish social security system and its impact on individual retirement behavior. First, we give some historical facts, as well as a more detailed description of the current situation, of labor market behavior of older persons. Second, we describe the social security system. We also describe the different occupational pension schemes, which have an increasing importance. Finally, we show the results from a simulation, where we have used the earnings path of several representative workers to calculate the implicit tax (or subsidy) rate on additional work after age 55 generated by the social security system in interaction with occupational pensions, income taxes as well as housing allowances. We find that the observed labor market behavior of older men is in accordance with the economic incentives generated by the social security system and in particular with the occupational pension scheme for blue collar workers.Keywords: Pensions; labor force participation; labor supply of older men JEL-Codes: H55; J14; J26The social insurance system has a very important role in the Swedish economy. In 1994, the amount of the benefits from this system represents 20% of Sweden's GDP,
SUMMARYThis paper presents an empirical analysis of how Sweden's public old age pension system affects the retirement decision. We focus on male blue-collar workers whose dominant income source as retired comes from the public old age pension system. We develop a dynamic programming model using the rules for the public pension system. In addition to the effects of economic incentives through the pension systems the DP model also measures the effect of the mandatory retirement age of 65-which applies to most parts of Sweden's labour market-on retirement behaviour. The estimated model fits within-sample retirement patterns remarkably well. A simulation of a hypothetical reform, where all retirement incentives in the pension schemes are delayed by three years, shows that economic incentives affect retirement behaviour.
This paper describes the development of population health and disability insurance utilization for older workers in Sweden and analyzes the relation between the two. We use three different measures of population health: (1) the mortality rate (measured between 1950 and 2009); (2) the prevalence of different types of health deficiencies obtained from Statistics Sweden's Survey on Living Conditions (ULF, 1975-2005); (3) the utilization of health care from the inpatient register (1968-2008). We also study the development of the relative health between disability insurance recipients and non-recipients. Finally, we study the effect of the introduction of less strict eligibility criteria for older workers in 1970 and 1972 as well as the subsequent abolishment of these rules in 1991 and 1997, respectively.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.