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Retirement Incentives and Expectations

Author

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  • Sewin Chan
  • Ann Huff Stevens

Abstract

This paper investigates the responsiveness of individuals' retirement expectations to forward-looking measures of pension wealth accumulations. While most of the existing literature on retirement has used cross-sectional variation to identify the effects of pension and Social Security wealth on retirement behavior, we estimate fixed-effects regressions to control for unobserved heterogeneity that might be correlated with retirement plans and wealth. As expected, we find significant effects of future pension wealth accumulations on retirement expectations, but the magnitude of these effects differs substantially between OLS and fixed-effects estimation. Coefficients from fixed-effects estimation are at most half the magnitude of similar OLS regressions. Our results point to potentially large biases from the failure to control for unobserved heterogeneity in empirical models of retirement-related outcomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Sewin Chan & Ann Huff Stevens, 2001. "Retirement Incentives and Expectations," NBER Working Papers 8082, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8082
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Spataro, Luca, 2005. "Social security incentives and retirement decisions in Italy: An empirical insight," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(3), pages 223-256, September.
    2. Michael Baker & Jonathan Gruber & Kevin Milligan, 2003. "The retirement incentive effects of Canada's Income Security programs," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 36(2), pages 261-290, May.
    3. Julia Lynn Coronado & Maria G. Perozek, 2003. "Wealth effects and the consumption of leisure: retirement decisions during the stock market boom of the 1900s," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2003-20, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    4. Luca Spataro, 2003. "Social Security And Retirement Decisions In Italy," Discussion Papers 2003/1, Dipartimento di Economia e Management (DEM), University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
    5. Alan L. Gustman & Thomas L. Steinmeier, 2001. "Imperfect Knowledge, Retirement and Saving," NBER Working Papers 8406, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Marjan, MAES, 2008. "Financial and redistributive impact of reforming the old-age pension system in Belgium," Discussion Papers (ECON - Département des Sciences Economiques) 2008040, Université catholique de Louvain, Département des Sciences Economiques.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J14 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-Labor Market Discrimination
    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics

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