We study the effect of incorporating heterogeneity into default rules by examining the choice between retirement plans at a firm that transitioned from a defined benefit (DB) to a defined contribution (DC) plan. The default plan for existing employees varied discontinuously depending on their age. Employing regression discontinuity techniques,…

Economists have long suggested that higher private pension benefits "crowd out" other sources of household wealth accumulation. We exploit detailed information on pensions and lifetime earnings for older workers in the 1992 wave of the Health and Retirement Study and employ an instrumental-variable (IV) identification strategy to estimate…

Media reports predicted that the stock market decline in October 2008 would cause changes in retirement intentions, due to declines in retirement assets. We use panel data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate the relationship between stock market performance and retirement intentions during 1998-2008, a period that includes the…

Using Spanish Social Security records, we document the channels through which mothers fall onto a lower earnings track, such as shifting into part- time work, accumulating lower experience, or transitioning to lower-paying jobs, and are able to explain 71 percent of the unconditional individual fixed- effects motherhood wage gap. The earnings…

After a long decline, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of older men in the United States leveled off in the 1980s, and began to increase in the late 1990s. We examine how changes in Social Security rules affected these trends. We attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s-80s to the increasing generosity of Social…

This paper analyzes a puzzling aspect of retirement behavior known as "unretirement." Nearly 50 percent of retirees follow a nontraditional retirement path that involves partial retirement or unretirement, and at least 26 percent of retirees later unretire. I explore two possible explanations: (1) unretirement transitions result from failures in…

As baby boomers reach retirement age, demographic pressures on public programs may cause policy makers to cut benefits and encourage employment at later ages. But how much demand exists for older workers? This paper reports on a field experiment to determine hiring conditions for older women in entry-level jobs in two cities. A younger worker is…