This PDF is a selection from an out-of-print volume from the National Bureau of Economic Research Volume Title: Social Security and Retirement around the World

Very few studies exist concerning the economic determinants of retirement age in France. Three main reasons may account for this situation. First, a common idea is that the French pension system offers little flexibility concerning choice of retirement age, with the result that little room is left for estimating economic models of retirement behavior. A second explanation is the complexity of the pension system, which renders data collection extremely difficult and discour-ages efforts to build systematic behavioral models. Third, age at exit from the labor force is determined not only by individual preferences and the structure of the pension system itself but more and more often by parallel systems such as preretirement schemes or specific dispositions of unemployment insurance targeted toward older workers, and the development of these schemes reflects both supply- and demand-side effects on the labor market; it may therefore appear meaningless to develop behavioral models that remain generally lim-ited to supply-side considerations. All these explanations are valid, but only partially. Flexibility in the choic