August 2025
15Aug

Retirement with dignity? The debate on active ageing in Europe

With an ageing population and increased life expectancy, Europe faces a very concrete challenge: how to fund its pension systems. Earlier this year in Brussels, pensioners took to the streets to demand better job security and to oppose the raising of the retirement age. In Europe, some are advocating lowering the retirement age as a way to improve workers' quality of life and to encourage generational turnover in the workforce. Others argue that this would jeopardise the sustainability of pension systems,...

August 15, 2025
News, ,
Read more...
15Aug

Retirement with dignity? The debate on active ageing in Europe

With an ageing population and increased life expectancy, Europe faces a very concrete challenge: how to fund its pension systems. Earlier this year in Brussels, pensioners took to the streets to demand better job security and to oppose the raising of the retirement age. In Europe, some are advocating lowering the retirement age as a way to improve workers' quality of life and to encourage generational turnover in the workforce. Others argue that this would jeopardise the sustainability of pension systems,...

August 15, 2025
News, ,
Read more...
08Aug

Rejuvenating Economics: Subjective Age’s Influence on Work-Life Balance

By Andre Briviba, Valentin Schnellmann & Bruno S. Frey Chronological age is a key indicator in economics, determining policy decisions such as the retirement age and the minimum voting age. The concept of subjective age, extensively studied by gerontologists and psychologists, may be particularly relevant to economic decision-making. Using panel data from German adults aged 40–65 and individual fixed-effects estimations, we investigate the effect of subjective age on work and life satisfaction. Furthermore, we estimate the impact of subjective age...

August 8, 2025
Aging, Articles, , ,
Read more...
07Aug

Top 5 countries with the highest retirement age

Retirement age marks an important milestone in a person’s working life—the point in many countries where an individual steps away from formal employment after years of contribution. Around the world, this age varies depending on things like how long people are expected to live, how many are active in the workforce, and how strong a country’s pension system is. While most countries set retirement between 60 and 65, many are now pushing it higher to keep up with aging populations and...

August 7, 2025
News
Read more...
06Aug

US. Increasing Social Security’s Retirement Age…

By Andrew G. Biggs Without forgetting that some people aren’t living longer. I have a new policy brief co-authored with John Shoven of Stanford looking at how we might address part of Social Security’s funding gap by raising the retirement age, but doing it in a way that account for differential mortality by income — the fact that rich people tend to live longer than the poor, which means that rich people are contributing more to Social Security’s insolvency than are the poor. The trick...

August 6, 2025
News, OP Ed, Op-Ed,
Read more...

July 2025
21Jul

Nearly 1 in 4 people in the U.S. over 50 are delaying retirement due to economic concerns, survey finds

About one-quarter of Americans over the age of 50 have been pushing back their retirement plans due to economic uncertainty and their financial readiness, a new survey finds. The survey, conducted by ROI Rocket for F&G Annuities & Life, polled 2,000 U.S. adults aged 50 and older who are financial decision-makers and have at least $100,000 in financial savings. Of this group, 23 percent said they are delaying their planned retirement date — a figure that shot up 14 percent from 2024. Half of...

July 21, 2025
News,
Read more...
14Jul

South Korea Boomers Having Their Wages Cut for Continuing to Work

South Korea's older workers are facing steep wage cuts and insecure work conditions simply for staying on the job past a certain age—a reality drawing criticism from rights groups. Why It Matters South Korea has one of the highest rates of elderly poverty in the developed world. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), 38 percent of people over 65 live in relative poverty. The nation's "peak wage" system and mandatory retirement policies are pushing many older workers into lower-paid, more precarious jobs, even as...

July 14, 2025
News,
Read more...
10Jul

UK. Older Brits delay retirement while younger workers risk being underprepared

Older Brits are delaying retirement due to the rising state pension age (SPA), according to research from the University of Bath, yet many younger workers, particularly women, risk being underprepared by holding onto unrealistic early retirement hopes. The research revealed a “clear” gap between expected and actual retirement behaviour, with younger workers expecting to retire before reaching SPA, while older workers tend to revise their plans when they are already close to retirement when opportunities to boost savings and continue...

July 10, 2025
News, ,
Read more...

June 2025
06Jun

Flexible Retirement and Optimal Taxation

By Abdoulaye Ndiaye & Zhixiu Yu Raising the retirement age is a common policy response when social security schemes face fiscal pressures. We develop and estimate a dynamic life cycle model to study optimal retirement and tax policy when individuals face health shocks and income risk and make endogenous retirement decisions. The model incorporates key features of Social Security, Medicare, income taxation, and savings incentives and distinguishes three channels through which health affects retirement: nonconvexities in labor supply due to...

June 6, 2025
Articles, Pension design, , ,
Read more...

May 2025
30May

The Early Retirement Gap: Does Job Satisfaction Matter Less for the Self-Employed?

By Raquel Justo, Adrian Merida & Juan A. Sanchis-Llopis Understanding the drivers of early retirement is increasingly important in the context of aging populations and growing concerns over pension sustainability. While extensive research has examined the retirement behavior of paid employees, the self-employed, who operate under distinct work arrangements and institutional contexts, remain comparatively understudied. This work examines whether job satisfaction influences actual retirement behavior differently for self-employed individuals and paid employees. Leveraging longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing...

May 30, 2025
Articles, Labor Market, , ,
Read more...