A1774
Title: The effect of retirement age reform on retirement behavior: Analysis and synthesis of several natural experiments
Authors: Kevin Stabenow - University of Muenster (Germany) [presenting]
Stella Martin - University of Muenster (Germany)
Abstract: The 2007 retirement age reform from Germany is used to evaluate the impact of an incrementally increasing pension eligibility age on the likelihood of retiring. We use an administrative data set from the German public pension fund containing full employment biographies on a monthly basis. We estimate treatment effects for the natural experiment we observe at each marginal retirement age increase of one month. We then set up a meta-analytic random effects model to synthesize our findings from the natural experiments in order to elicit an overall treatment effect of a rise in the legal retirement age. We find that individuals with an increased pension age retire later and are less likely to be in early retirement prior to their legal retirement age than those in the control group are at a given age.
