SOCIAL SECURITY AND WELL-BEING AROUND THE WORLD

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The vast differences in social security program provisions across countries have provided a natural laboratory for our ongoing international comparison project to study the influence of program provisions on individual behavior. The findings have made clear that social security provisions in most countries induce older workers to leave the labor force early, and that the large difference in retirement behavior across countries can be explained in large part by the provisions of these programs. The findings also show that much of the inducement to retire comes through programs nominally labeled "disability insurance," although it is evident that in many countries these programs essentially serve as routes to early retirement before the social security early retirement age. Beyond these results, there are several additional questions that we believe must be addressed to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the broader implications of social security reform. The proposal is to continue international comparative analysis with our established team of participants. There are three aims: (1) To understand the relationship between social security system provisions and the well-being of the elderly--as well as the young. (2) To understand the relationship between social security system provisions and the employment of the young. (3) To understand how the relationship between health status and retirement varies with the provisions of social security (including disability insurance) programs, and to understand how the well-being of the disabled and the non-disabled elderly depends on program provisions. The prospect of comparable longitudinal data for the study of the health and retirement of older persons--through the nexus of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA), and the forthcoming Survey of Health Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) surveys--makes such analysis especially timely.