Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research’s International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related questions. The project employs a harmonized approach to conduct within-country analyses that are combined for meaningful cross country comparisons. The key lesson is that the choices of policy makers affect the incentive to work at older ages and these incentives have important effects on retirement behavior.
Authors
James Banks
James is Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Economics at Manchester, working on broad issues in the economics of retirement, savings and health.
Richard Blundell
Richard is Co-Director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP) and Senior Research Fellow at IFS.
Carl Emmerson
Carl, a Deputy Director, is an editor of the IFS Green Budget, an expert on the UK pension system and sits on the Social Security Advisory Committee.
Paul Johnson
Paul has been the Director of the IFS since 2011. He is also currently visiting professor in the Department of Economics at University College London.
David Sturrock
David’s research covers household wealth, intergenerational transfers, social mobility, pensions taxation, and health and work at older ages.
Costas Meghir
Costas is a Research Fellow of the IFS and a Professor of Economics at Yale University and a Visiting Professor at University College London.
Sarah Smith
Sarah is a Research Associate at the IFS and Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Bristol with interest in applied microeconomics.
More from IFS
Understand this issue
Policy analysis
Academic research
