Retirement is commonly described as a pure labor supply decision, despite the potential importance of the demand side channel. This is partly due to the fact that both dimensions are often difficult to disentangle. In this paper, I manage to overcome this difficulty by using a unique natural experiment, the progressive ban of mandatory retirement in France in the 2000s. Drawing on an extensive administrative dataset, I use inter-industry reforminduced variations in mandatory retirement legislation, thereby insulating this factor from other determinants of retirement, such as financial incentives. I find that demand-side determinants through mandatory retirement do affect retirement patterns: exit rates from employment are estimated to be 6% higher when mandatory retirement is possible. Secondly, as the mandatory retirement age coincides with the full rate age, I exhibit a previously uncovered determinant of the large bunching in retirement distribution at this age. Mandatory retirement is estimated to explain 10% of the observed spike at full rate.
Increasing the minimum retirement age is a widespread option chosen by policy makers to reduce spending in financially constrained public pension systems. Yet, the effectiveness of such a reform strongly depends on the ability of individuals to postpone their withdrawal from the labor force. In this paper, we study the immediate impact of the 2010 reform of the French pension system by carrying out a short-term evaluation on the increase of the statutory eligibility age from 60 to 61. We use a differences-in-differences methodology, comparing the trajectories from work to retirement for succeeding generations facing a different statutory age. Using a detailed social security administrative database, we provide a global assessment of the effects of the reform, accounting for the potential substitution effects from old-age insurance toward unemployment, sickness or disability insurance schemes. Our findings suggest that despite a sizable effect on the employment rate, the reform also strongly increased unemployment and disability rates.
Le système de retraite français a été beaucoup réformé au cours des dernières décennies et ces réformes devraient avoir des effets financiers extrêmement significatifs. Mais deux questions restent ouvertes. La première est celle de la simplification d’un système peu lisible et non harmonisé. La seconde est que les réformes passées ne gèrent pas bien l’incertitude économique et démographique à laquelle le système est exposé. Sa sensibilité aux aléas de la croissance économique a même été accrue par les règles d’indexation sur les prix mises en place dès la fin des années 1980. Cet article utilise le modèle Pensipp pour explorer trois réponses possibles à ce dernier problème : deux réformes structurelles (comptes notionnels ou généralisation de la retraite par points) et un scénario paramétrique se contentant de rationaliser les règles d’indexation du système actuel.
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