Alternative Pathways to Retirement

说明（由申请人提供）：考虑不同的退休途径对于设计有效的养老金改革非常重要，这是保证养老金制度财务稳定所必需的。例如，提高法定退休年龄或削减提前退休福利不太可能扭转提前退休的趋势，如果个人可以通过残疾或失业保险计划退休的话。我们的项目的目标是了解诱导个人提前退休的（财务）激励措施，考虑到所有可用的退休渠道和其他可能影响近老年工人参与决策的因素。该项目将利用个人行政数据，其中载有1972年至2007年期间奥地利全国收入和就业历史的详细信息。鉴于社会保障制度和老龄化人口结构的相似性，我们的结果可以在很大程度上适用于其他工业化国家。 详细的行政数据和一系列国家养老金改革的政策变化相结合，为我们提供了一个独特的机会，以美国不可能的方式了解个人的退休决定。由于奥地利的许多改革模仿了世界各地政策制定者目前正在讨论的政策变化，因此研究其影响可以产生重要的见解，以指导包括美国在内的其他几个国家的社会保障，残疾保险和失业保险改革。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Accounting for different pathways to retirement is important for designing effective pension reforms, which are necessary to guarantee the financial stability of the pension system. For example, raising the statutory retirement age or cutting early retirement benefits are unlikely to reverse trends in early retirement if individuals can retire through the disability or unemployment insurance programs instead. The goal of our project is to understand the (financial) incentives that induce individuals to retire early, taking into account all available retirement channels and other factors that may affect the participation decisions of near-elderly workers. The project will make use of individual administrative data, which contains detailed information regarding earnings and employment histories, covering all of Austria in the period 1972 to 2007. Given the similarity in characteristics of the social security system and the aging population structure, our results can be applied largely to other industrialized countries. The combination of detailed administrative data and policy variation from a series of national pension reforms presents us with a unique opportunity to learn about individuals' retirement decisions in ways that are impossible in a U.S. setting. Because many of the Austrian reforms mimic policy changes that are currently debated by policymakers around the world, studying their effects can yield important insights to guide social security, disability insurance and unemployment insurance reforms in several other countries, including the United States.