Is it worth raising the normal retirement age?: A new model to estimate the employment effects

Pension reforms, particularly those changing the normal retirement ages, are both crucial and controversial in ageing developed countries. This paper investigates the effects of such reforms on the labour market, focusing on the older-age employment rate. While existing cross-country estimates agree on a positive and significant effect of raising normal retirement ages, the estimated labour market effects are modest and usually much smaller than those derived from country-specific studies using micro data. This study attempts to reconcile these differences by introducing greater heterogeneity into the cross-country approach to better capture country-specific demographics and pension system characteristics, so that estimated effects are closer to those from single-country studies. Starting from a standard cross-country panel error correction model, several empirical innovations are introduced to better capture the influence of the demographic composition of countries, the possibility to retire at earlier ages, and the importance of private pension funds and early exit pathways. These changes result in larger and more heterogeneous predicted effects of changes in the normal retirement ages on the older-age employment rate and average age of labour market exit across countries. This suggests a greater and varied impact of pension reforms on the labour market than previously estimated with pooled cross-country estimations, emphasising the importance of considering countries’ demographic compositions and pension systems specificities when predicting the effects of pension reforms. The proposed model, distinguishing between minimum and normal retirement ages, allows for simulations on the effects of increasing normal retirement ages and narrowing the gap between normal and minimum retirement ages. In countries with the lowest older age employment rates, bridging these gaps could result in substantial increases in their employment rates.