the retirement behaviour of the self employed in britain we analyze the retirement behaviour of older self employed workers using a life cycle framework and a multinomial logit model of dynamic employment and retirement choices using data from the two wave retirement survey we find that greater actual or potential earnings decrease the probability of retirement among the self employed in contrast to employees none of gender health or family circumstances appear to affect self employed retirement decisions the dynamic analysis reveals that relatively few employees and virtually no retirees switch into self employment in later life the switches that do occur are motivated less by attempts to use self employment as a bridge job or stepping stone to full retirement than by self employment being a last resort for less affluent workers with job histories of weak attachment to the labour market we compare self employed and employee retirement behaviour and discuss the policy implications of our results

delays in claiming social security benefits this paper focuses on social security benefit claiming behavior a takeup decision that has been ignored in the previous literature using financial calculations and simulations based on an expected utility maximization model we show that delaying benefit claim for a period of time after retirement is optimal in a wide variety of cases and that gains from delay may be significant we find that approximately 10 of men retiring before their 62nd birthday delay claiming for at least one year after eligibility we estimate hazard and probit models using data from the new beneficiary data system to test four cross sectional predictions while the data suggest that too few men delay we find that the pattern of delays by early retirees is generally consistent with the hypotheses generated by our theoretical model

where do we go from here 2 real wages effective demand and economic development a central purpose of this paper is to argue for a more active role for historical analysis in filling out and extending classical theory firstly what is required is a more modern vision of capitalist growth which would not only include such classical variables as the rate of profit and accumulation but also take into account the changing level and composition of the standard of living and how this interrelates with the compositional evolution of the industrial structure including the effect of new technology and changes in industrial organisation such as the development of new industries new products and new systems of marketing the second important need is for a more differentiated class analysis with which to study the growth process this would require a detailed consideration of the historical stratification and re stratification of the working class and would incorporate an analysis of the impact of and the interaction between the evolving industrial and political organisation of labour state policy collective bargaining the restructuring of labour resulting from changing power relations in the market and in the labour process changing technology and industrial organisation these processes have particular relevance in the present context for inter and intra class distribution of income and how this relates to the level and structuring of demand the paper consists of five main sections the first considers representative attempts to incorporate historical processes into theory the second considers the development in the structure of consumption in britain since 1860 the third links changing consumption to the standard of living the fourth examines the relationship between the standard of life and institutional developments in wage determination and in welfare provision and the fifth is a brief attempt to relate these factors to economic development

welfare consequences of the six year presidential term evaluated in the context of a model of the u s economy we evaluate the six year presidential term proposal in the context of a model of the u s economy characterized by a short run but not a long run trade off between inflation and unemployment votes and public welfare are separately conceptualized as functions of inflation and unemployment which are indirectly controlled by the president through manipulation of government spending in a series of simulation experiments the vote maximizing choice of policy instruments led to less we fare loss with six than with four year terms under most conditions ironically vote maximizing was shown to lead not only to short and long term welfare loss but also to long run political disadvantage

the rise and decline of managerial development alfred d chandler s work highlighted the complicated interplay between markets and firms especially the arrangements created by firms to buffer and manage market forces arguably his most important work examines one aspect of firms organizational structure and how it changed in response to the competitive needs of growing businesses much the same approach can be applied to understanding other aspects of firms such as the structure of the most important jobs in corporations executive positions and how those positions have been filled over time here the interplay includes a different market the labor market the arguments that follow trace the evolution of executive roles from the early days of corporations where executive jobs were largely shaped by the labor market to internalized and bureaucratized arrangements consistent with the idea of an integrated chandlerian firm after the 1950s back to something much closer to the market dominated approach following the 1982 recession in large measure the change seems driven by the different context that business faced and the interplay with labor markets that made internal development more difficult the implications for the future of large scale chandlerian firms may be considerable copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

general economic conditions and national elections the fact that economic conditions influence voters is a leading commonplace of conversation in election years the question is is this fact in fact a fact despite the overwhelming popularity of the fact it has received neither an explicit theoretical analysis presumably because it is so obvious that economic adversity should create political adversaries nor until recently a satisfactory statistical analysis gerald h kramer has presented a multivariate analysis of congressional elections which would strongly suggest that fluctuations in the rate of unemployment have no appreciable effect upon elections but that fluctuations in per capita real income are influential in the following pages i propose to 1 reaffirm his finding on the electoral unimportance of ordinary fluctuations in unemployment 2 argue that contrary to kramer fluctuations in real income also do not have important electoral effects and 3 present an argument based upon rational voter behavior for the unimportance of general economic conditions in national elections

bridge jobs and partial retirement the job stopping process of older workers often includes some combination of postcareer bridge employment partial retirement and reverse retirement fewer than two fifths of household heads retire directly from career jobs over half partially retire at some point in their working lives and a quarter reenter the labor force after initially retiring in addition postcareer employment is frequently located outside the industry and occupation of the career job and there are important differences in postcareer labor force experiences by gender permanent income and career job pension status

the political viability of rule based monetary policy we have estimated two models explaining political support for the president as a function of economic performance one model reflects the assumption characterizing most of the literature that voters indiscriminately punish inflation and unemployment without regard to the tradeoffs between them the other represents a more demanding conception of voter sophistication about macroeconomic possibilities and about control of the money supply while the data do not unambiguously designate a best model of behavior the sophisticated voter hypothesis performs as well as the naive voter hypothesis in the context of our study clearly this result is subject to the usual econometric caveats including possible misspecification of the model multicollinearity among independent variables etc however there is no particular reason to believe that these problems should favor one model as opposed to the other thus while we cannot conclude that voters really think in terms of rates of growth of velocity and natural output we can question the conventional wisdom that consistent rule based monetary policies may not be politically viable

the effect of social security on retirement in the early 1970s we analyze detailed longitudinal data on a cohort of males aged 58 67 in 1969 1973 a period of substantial increases in real social security benefits we find the following 1 the accelerating decline in labor force participation of elderly men in 1969 1973 can be explained by the large increase in real social security benefits 2 there is evidence of a liquidity constraint effect for an important subgroup of the elderly 3 the magnitude of this induced retirement effect is large enough that ignoring it can lead to serious underestimation of the fiscal implications of changes in benefit provisions our results are interpreted in the historical context of a particular cohort undergoing major unanticipated transfers of wealth the steady state effects of social security on retirement may not be the same

do pensions increase the labor supply of older men this paper investigates the relationship between pension coverage and the retirement behavior of older men pensions are associated with higher work involvement for males in their late fifties and early sixties but with lower rates of job holding for those aged 65 69 age of entry into pension employment is shown to be positively correlated with future labor supply when combined with evidence on age specific changes in labor force participation rates this pattern casts doubt on the hypothesis that broadened pension coverage explains a substantial portion of the trend towards earlier male retirement

the political economy of socially irrational products in the past long waves have dissipated themselves in an exhaustion of innovations under spending and or a shortage of labour and ensuing upswings depended upon adjustments in the wage profit relation and a restructuring of the patterns of production and consumption whereas monetarist keynesian and marxist perspectives all focus attention on changes in the distributional or former dimension of the present crisis in this paper i argue that the critical distinguishing feature is grounded more in the latter the intractable character of post world war ii production and consumption the intractability refers to the resilience of the contemporary structure of production and consumption whereas in the past competitive market forces facilitated the restructuring of production and consumption required at the end of a long boom today the economy remains encumbered with a range of investments and product forms entrenched within the social and political order but which are increasingly costly in real terms proposals to resolve these dislocations by government cutbacks and the imposition of selective austerity fail to capture the organisational sources of rising costs and government paralysis even if such programmes were to stimulate a renewed spurt of economic growth they would quickly be accompanied by rising cost pressures and a political backlash for the austerity would be imposed on a populace imprisoned within an expensive infrastructure of consumption and therefore required to maintain a high level of expenditure the task of this paper is to explain the intractable character of the current crisis in terms of the contemporary organisation of consumption and production the argument proceeds in the following order first the politicised market generating irrational patterns of production and consumption in key industries has driven up the cost of living second these patterns of production and consumption once they were embedded in political and social institutions have become highly resistant to the competitive forces which in theory reduce inflationary pressures third the burdens and constraints imposed on the state by the prevailing patterns of production and consumption combine with the relative ineffectiveness of keynesian and monetarist measures to set up the state as a scapegoat for economic irrationalities lodged more deeply in the contemporary structure of production and consumption

changes in pension incentives through time a common assumption in the compensation and retirement literature often necessitated by lack of data is that company sponsored pensions are static institutions the present paper a study of the pension plans at 14 companies for the years 1960 1970 and 1980 challenges this assumption showing that pension schemes are actually quite dynamic over time specifically the authors find that in 1960 all 14 pension plans tended to reward delayed retirement but by 1980 many of the union plans actively encouraged early retirement nonunion plans in the sample however rewarded deferred retirement in all three years the observed changes in pension incentives may have resulted in part from statutory increases in the age at which workers can be forced to retire by an employer

the keynesian and political determinants of unbalanced budgets u s fiscal policy from eisenhower to reagan the political business cycle proposition that politicians manipulate fiscal policy for political advantage is largely untested more often than not such manipulation is only assumed to occur on the basis of observed movements in inflation and unemployment and the few direct tests of the manipulation hypothesis are characterized by limited consideration of the full possibilities for political influence inadequate control for nonpolitical stabilization policy and inconsistent results this paper constructs several models of political fiscal policy incorporates them into a simple model of keynesian stabilization policy and tests the combined models using u s budget surplus deficit data from fy54 to fy83 the results provide little support for either the electoral motivation or partisan differences interpretations of the political business cycle the implications of these findings for the political business cycle literature long term economic management and deficit directed proposals for institutional reform are discussed

retirement wages and labor supply of the elderly a model of labor force participation market wages and labor supply of annual hours and weeks of work is estimated for married males and unmarried females in a sample from the retirement history survey 1969 75 matched with social security earnings records emphasis is placed on the effects of variables associated with retirement and old age and on the estimation of net age profiles purged of biases associated with specific years and cohorts and with the other included variables the effects of most of the usual variables appear to be consistent with the theory and with other empirical findings for both sexes in addition age itself has a strong net autonomous effect on each of the dependent variables due to biological societal or institutional factors

housing wealth property taxes and labor supply among the elderly we investigate the relationship between housing wealth property taxes and elderly labor supply using longitudinal data from the health and retirement survey spanning the recent boom bust housing cycle when combined with msa specific house price indexes the data provide plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth identified through within msa renter homeowner comparisons our findings suggest that elderly households respond to variation in housing wealth and property taxes in the predicted opposing directions that wealth influences labor supply to a lesser extent than factors like health and marital status and that the effect of housing wealth on labor supply varies by gender and age

a new view of political accountability for economic performance most political support models imply that in evaluating economic performance voters use a standard that would provide poor predictions of the future and leave the economy vulnerable to manipulation by vote hungry politicians drawing on macroeconomic theory we develop a simple standard of evaluation which encompasses a concern not only for current economic outcomes but also for accurately assessed future consequences of current policies we find that political support for the president can be explained as well by models that assume that voters use this sophisticated standard as by models that assume voter naivete our analysis questions the wisdom of measures typically used to assess voter evaluation of economic performance in a variety of theoretical contexts the results also help to explain the absence of convincing evidence that governments exploit voter ignorance in manipulating the economy

the effect of social security on labor supply a cohort analysis of the notch generation this article uses aggregate birth year calendar year level data derived from the current population survey cps to estimate the effect of social security wealth on the labor supply of older men in the 1970s and 1980s the analysis focuses on measuring the impact of the 1977 amendments to the social security act which created a substantial unanticipated reduction in social security wealth for individuals born after 1916 this differential in benefits has become known as the benefit notch results indicate that labor supply continued to decline for the notch babies who received lower social security benefits than earlier cohorts

electoral and welfare consequences of political manipulation of the economy abstract this paper examines the long term electoral and welfare consequences of repeated strategies whereby a political office holder induces cycles in economic variables to maximize his chances of re election unlike other studies of political business cycles we focus on questions of the desirability of these cyclical patterns and on the long run properties of these political economic models noting that the welfare costs of vote maximizing in a single term extend beyond that term we examine in detail the properties of the long run equilibrium path to which such cycles converge if the economy starts above this path vote maximizing can lead to increased social welfare and vote margins however if the economy starts below this path vote maximizing in the present can cause reduced votes and electocal defeat in subsequent terms this possibility should lead a far sighted enlightened politician or political party to eschew vote maximizing tactics and the political business cycles which accompany them and thus canhelp explain why empirical studies have not found convincing evidence of the existence of such cycles this paper also quantifies the dependence of this long run equilibrium path on the important political and economic parameters of the model

partial retirement as a separate mode of retirement behavior partial retirement is a quantitatively important retirement state that shows significant structural differences from behavioral functions of either full retirement or full time work alternative models of the choice of retirement state are estimated on a sample of white married males from the retirement history survey 1967 1973 findings suggest that while partial retirement appears to take several different forms the critical choice for a large number of older workers appears to be that of labor force participation first with either partial or full time employment determined conditionally among participants the model has good explanatory power and conforms to expectations of the effects of various relevant variables on labor supply decisions

market power in a non monetarist inflation model for greece a post keynesian inflation model for greece is constructed and tested the model consists of three equations including a cost demand price equation for the gross domestic expenditure deflator cost demand functions have been occasionally estimated in the past the equation presented is a more systematic test since the effect of industry concentration is examined both theoretically and empirically a collective bargaining equation for the first time in greece was simultaneously estimated the role of public deficit was investigated and it was found that this exerts a moderate influence on inflation

labor market shocks and retirement do government programs matter abstract this paper argues that labor market conditions are an important and often overlooked determinant of retirement transitions in our analysis we examine how the unemployment rate affects retirement and whether the social security ss system and unemployment insurance ui system influence how older workers respond to labor market shocks we use pooled cross sectional data from the march current population survey cps in our analysis we find that downturns in the labor market increase retirement transitions and that the magnitude of this effect is comparable to that associated with moderate changes in financial incentives to retire and to the threat of a health shock facing older workers interestingly retirements only increase in response to an economic downturn once workers become ss eligible suggesting that retirement benefits may help to alleviate the income loss associated with a weak labor market we also estimate the impact of ui generosity on retirement and find little consistent evidence of an effect this suggests that in some ways ss may serve as a more effective form of unemployment insurance for older workers than ui

labor force dynamics of older men this paper describes and analyzes movements of older men among labor force states in the united states using quarterly observations derived from the retirement history survey rhs the results indicate substantial undercounts in the biannual data indicating that the prevalence of labor force movements at older ages has been underestimated previously the results show that labor force dynamics at older ages are important including duration and spell occurrence dependence and work experience effects these effects are robust to nonparametric controls for unobserved heterogeneity the estimates indicate that social security benefits have strong effects on the timing of labor force transitions at older ages but that changes in social security benefit levels over time have not contributed much to the trend toward earlier labor force exit excerpt

the political manipulation of macroeconomic policy conventional wisdom and some research indicate that macroeconomic policies follow cycles corresponding to political as well as economic forces using vector autoregression analysis i test three models of monetary policy determination for the united states 1953 1984 the electoral cycle model that reelection motivations on the part of presidents create a policy cycle the party differences model that policy changes reflect revolving presidential party administrations and the referendum model that changes in presidential approval create in effect a continuing referendum allowing presidents to monitor their success and change macroeconomic policies when necessary analysis shows that monetary policies as measured by the monetary base and short term interest rates respond to the election cycle and presidential approval although the effect on macroeconomic outcomes is ambiguous party differences are found in real income but are not very significant in other variables

early retirement provisions and the labor force behavior of older men evidence from canada we examine the sequential introduction of early retirement provisions to canada s two public pension plans these reforms provide a unique opportunity to assess the effect of public pension plan parameters on labor supply behavior free of the biases that potentially affect the simple time series or cross section inference presented in many previous studies we find that the reforms led to an increase in pension receipt but had little immediate effect on labor market behavior this is due to the fact that men who initially took advantage of the early retirement provisions would otherwise have had limited labor market participation

future social security entitlements and the retirement decision abstract a critical question for social security policy is how program incentives affect retirement behavior we use the health and retirement survey hrs to examine the impact of social security incentives on male retirement we implement forward looking models whereby individuals consider the incentives to work in all future years we find that forward looking incentive measures for social security are significant determinants of retirement we also find that private pension incentives have roughly similar effects our findings suggest that social security policies that increase the incentives to work at older ages can significantly reduce the labor force exit rate of older workers

explaining pension dynamics whether and how the labor market will adapt to anticipated changes in the workforce age distribution depends on how able companies are to induce desired turnover patterns among older and younger employees this paper contends that companies can and will use pension plan provisions as powerful incentives to induce people to remain on their jobs and perhaps even more importantly to leave at later ages a longitudinalfile of collectively bargained pension plans gathered by the united states bureau of labor statistics is examined empirically we find dramatic increases in benefit levels reductions in early normal and deferred retirement ages and declines in the age at which pension present values peak with retirement after that age penalized several explanations for these observed pension outcomes are evaluated empirically we believe that these findings indicate how employer provided pensions can and will play an important role in helping companies induce desired turnover patterns as the workforce ages

secular changes in the work and retirement patterns of older men this paper examines trends in the work and retirement patterns of males aged 58 to 63 in 1969 and 1989 respectively the labor force attachments of this group have fallen for reasons unrelated to changes in individual characteristics or occupational attainment especially sharp reductions at age 62 hint at an increasingly important role for the early retirement provisions in social security attachments to longest jobs have also declined substantially beginning at age 55 although pension incentives may be significant the observed correlations between pensions and employment status may also reflect the role of confounding factors such as poorly measured nonpension wealth

job search requirements for unemployed at the end of working life effects on unemployment dynamics and self employment probabilities this paper investigates the extent to which job search requirements in unemployment insurance u i increase the probability of self employment as a retirement route for causal identification we apply a difference in differences approach using a dutch 2004 policy reform that introduced job search requirements in u i for persons aged 57 5 and older unemployment dynamics and self employment probabilities are studied using a dynamic multinomial logit model with unobserved heterogeneity the results suggest that job search requirements stimulated people to exit unemployment and discouraged older workers to enter unemployment the probability of self employment as an exit route to retirement increased relative to u i but not relative to paid employment

do changes in demographic characteristics explain declining male employment rates examination of the australian case using a propensity score re weighting decomposition approach using australian data spanning the period from 1981 to 2001 we apply a propensity score re weighting decomposition approach to investigate the extent to which the large decline in the male employment population rate over this period can be attributed to changes in socio demographic characteristics we find that changes in observed characteristics account for little of the aggregate decline however changes in characteristics are found to be important for population sub groups in particular changes in partner status and partner employment status have acted to decrease employment rates of younger males but increase employment rates of older males a further finding is that holding observed characteristics constant there has been a very large decline in the employment rate of 55 64 year olds with bachelor degree qualifications in the course of applying the decomposition method we illustrate that validity of inferences depends on appropriate specification of the reweighting function

pensions bonding and lifetime jobs a well known if underappreciated finding in the mobility literature is that turnover is much lower in jobs covered by pensions than in other jobs this could result from capital losses for job changes created by most benefit formulas the tendency of turnover prone individuals to avoid jobs covered by pensions or higher overall compensation levels in such jobs a switching bivariate probit model of pension coverage and turnover is developed to estimate the effect of each of these factors the results show that capital losses are the main factor responsible for lower turnover in jobs covered by pensions but self selection and compensation levels also play an important role this is the first direct evidence that bonding is important for understanding long term employment relationships

toward explaining earlier retirement after 1970 this study investigates why after 15 years of virtual stability u s labor force participation rates for men aged 55 to 64 fell by approximately 20 from 1970 through 1986 the author s analysis of rule changes in the social security system and pension plans suggests that part of this reduction was caused by an increase in social security benefits by almost 50 during the 1970s half of which is not reflected in legislation which worked to create unexpected wealth effects similar to those that characterized the system during the early 1950s but an equally important cause was a widespread change in private pension plan rules toward encouraging earlier retirement these conclusions challenge the common notion that earlier retirement is largely a supply side phenomenon