Impact of retiree health plans on faculty retirement decisions (original) (raw)
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Retiree Health Benefits and the Decision to Retire
We estimate the effect of employer offers of retiree health benefits (RHBs) on the timing of retirement using a sample of men observed over a period of up to 12 years in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Our main concern is that such estimates may be contaminated by unobserved heterogeneity—workers with a taste for early retirement sort into jobs offering RHBs. We attempt to address this concern by using a fixed-effects estimator, which yields substantially smaller estimates of the effect of RHB offers than estimators that do not attempt to control for unobservables. The findings suggest that an RHB offer increased the probability of retirement by 14 percent on average for men born between 1931 and 1941.
2005
work was made possible by the financial support of the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured at the University of Michigan. The authors also gratefully acknowledge additional financial support from the National Institute on Aging under grant 1 P01 AG022481-01A1. Ben´ıtez-Silva is grateful for the hospitality of the Departments of Economics of the University of Maryland and Universitat Pompeu Fabra during the completion of this paper, and to the Fundaci´on BBVA for financial support. We thank the staff of the University of Michigan Survey Research Center and the Health and Retirement Study for answering numerous questions. The opinions expressed in this paper are ours alone and do not represent the opinions of ERIU, or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or its staff. This paper analyzes the dynamics of health insurance coverage, health expenditures, and health status in the decade expanding from 1992 to 2002, for a cohort of older Americans. We follow 13,594...
Essays on Labor and Health Economics
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This dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay studies the effect of different kinds of pension plans on the labor market decisions of the older workers. Due to the aging population, Social Security’s projected annual cost is expected to increase to about 6.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product by 2035, thus posing significant challenges to the U.S. policy makers. This has fueled an interest in research geared towards understanding the determinants of retirement. Past research has shown that pensions have a significant effect on retirement decisions. But the pension landscape in the U.S. has changed dramatically in the last few decades. From being once dominated by the traditional annuity-based Defined Benefit (DB) plans, the trend has now moved towards account-based Defined Contribution (DC) plans. This change has been accompanied by a reversal in the participation trend of older workers resulting in an increasing labor force participation of the elderly in the United ...