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…

In this paper the authors examine how the structures of earnings, Social Security, and pension benefits affect retirement behavior. They use an intertemporal model of labor supply, paying special attention to the institutional features of private pensions and Social Security benefits. (Author/SSH)

Net depreciation rates in human capital are estimated from wage data on a longitudinal sample of men aged 45 to 64. The results indicate that wage rates begin to decline in the early 50s at rates under one percent annually and decline at about two percent annually after age 60. (Author)