Social Insurance and Retirement : A Cross-Country Perspective

We study the role of old-age pensions, disability insurance and healthcare in account-ing for the differing labor supply patterns of older individuals across countries. Wedevelop a life cycle model of labor supply and health with heterogeneous agents.In our framework, people choose when to stop working and when/if to apply fordisability and pension benefits. We find that the incentives faced by older workersdiffer hugely across countries. In fact, based solely on differences in social insuranceprograms, the model predicts even more cross-country variation in the employmentrates of people aged 55-69 than we observe in the data