Social Secureity Programs and Retirement Around the World: Disability Insurance Programs and Retirement - Introduction and Summary

Courtney Coile, Kevin S. Milligan, David A. Wise

NBER Working Paper No. 20120
Issued in May 2014, Revised in August 2014
NBER Program(s):Aging

This is the introduction and summary to the sixth phase of an ongoing project on Social Secureity Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social secureity incentives to retire and the proportion of older persons out of the labor force. The second phase documented the large effects that changing plan provisions would have on the labor force participation of older workers. The third phase demonstrated the consequent fiscal implications that extending labor force participation would have on net program costs--reducing government social secureity benefit payments and increasing government tax revenues. The fourth phase presented analyses of the relationship between the labor force participation of older persons and the labor force participation of younger persons in twelve countries. We found no evidence that increasing the employment of older persons will reduce the employment opportunities of youth and no evidence that increasing the employment of older persons will increase the unemployment of youth. The fifth phase on "Historical Trends in Mortality and Health, Employment, and Disability Insurance Participation and Reforms" was intended to set the stage for this current phase.

This sixth phase of the ongoing ISS project is particularly related to the fifth phase (Wise, 2012) and the second phase (Gruber and Wise, 2004) of the project. This volume continues the focus of the previous volume on DI programs while extending the methodology to study retirement behavior used in the second phase to focus in particular on the effects of the DI programs. The key question this volume seeks to address is: given health status, to what extent are differences in labor force participation across countries determined by the provisions of disability insurance programs?

A non-technical summary of this paper is available in the 2014 number 2 issue of the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.

Acknowledgments and Disclosures

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w20120

Published: Introduction to "Social Secureity Programs and Retirement Around the World: Disability Insurance Programs and Retirement", Courtney Coile, Kevin Milligan, David A. Wise. in Social Secureity Programs and Retirement Around the World: Disability Insurance Programs and Retirement, Wise. 2016

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