Search

We investigate the impact of a 2005 policy that provided more generous terms for delaying state pensions in the United Kingdom. First, we find that the policy reduced the fraction of males and possibly females receiving pensions at the earliest eligibility age and shortly thereafter. This shift affected cohorts who became eligible for state pensions at or after the policy change. Second, the policy is associated with increases in male and female labor supply around the earliest pension eligibility age, consistent with some individuals working longer to finance pension delay. However, further analysis suggests that these labor supply changes are more likely to reflect longer-term trends across birth cohorts rather than a causal effect of the policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine how labour supply changes around divorces that occur later in life. We find that the probability of work and hours worked increase for women, but decline for men, with evidence of an anticipation effect for men. We find weak evidence of a post-divorce decline in per-capita wealth and stronger evidence of a decline in per-capita non-own-wage income for women, but not for men. While not causal, these findings are consistent with income and possibly wealth effects driving the post-divorce increase in women's labour supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on part-time employment. Because the ACA’s employer health insurance mandate applies to individuals who work 30 or more hours per week, employers may try to avoid the mandate by cutting workers’ hours below the 30-hour threshold in order to avoid having to provide them with health insurance. Although the employer mandate only went into effect in 2015, many observers have argued that forward-looking employers began to shift towards a part-time workforce well in advance of the mandate. To test this hypothesis, we examine relative shifts across two categories of part-time workers (25–29 hours and 31–35 hours). We find some evidence of a shift from the 31–35-hour category into the 25–29-hour category after the passage of ACA in March 2010. However, that shift is not more pronounced among low-wage workers or among workers in industries and occupations most likely to be affected by the mandate. Thus, there is little evidence that the ACA hascausedthe shift across hours categories, or led to an increase in part-time employment. However, the ACA could cause a shift towards part-time work in the future as the mandate takes effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most government employees have access to retiree health coverage, which provides them with group health coverage even if they retire before Medicare eligibility. We study the impact of retiree health coverage on the labor supply of public sector workers between the ages of 55 and 64. We find that retiree health coverage raises the probability of stopping full time work by 4.3 percentage points (around 38 percent) over two years among public sector workers aged 55–59, and by 6.7 percentage points (around 26 percent) over two years among public sector workers aged 60–64. In the younger age group, retiree health insurance mostly seems to facilitate transitions to part-time work rather than full retirement. However, in the older age group, it increases the probability of stopping work entirely by 4.3 percentage points (around 22 percent). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]