September 21, 2022
12:50 - 13:50
Louvain-la-Neuve
CORE - Room C035
Sefane Cetin will kick us off, with her the paper titled “Retirement Decision of Belgian Couples and the Impact of the Social Security System“.
Abstract:
This paper investigates retirement patterns of married couples in Belgium. We use social security administrative data over the years 2003-2017 and employ a discrete choice model to predict retirement behavior. In particular, we focus on the spousal bonus of pension benefits in order to understand how financial incentives coming from the structure of the social security system influence both spouses' retirement decisions. Our results show that there is a considerably small impact of the hypothetical policy change of removing the spousal bonus. The share of women who retires before the earliest eligibility age drops from 23% to 21% when the spousal bonus is removed. More than half of women, who would be eligible to benefit from the spousal bonus initially, switch to alternative retirement routes. Surprisingly, we do not observe a significant change in men’s retirement behavior.