Proposal:
Our econometrics group which consists of Barra Fennell (barrafennell@gmail.com), Jenny Grier (jennygrier 5@hotmail.com), Enda Hargaden (ehargade@tcd.ie) and Luis Pinedo Caro (bizantino2@hotmail.com) would like to investigate the factors thatinfluence the age at which people in Europe retire. This is an important issue facing public finances throughout an ageing continent. Such a decision is a factor of several variables. Obvious examples of factors that may be important are the statutory retirement age, the generosity of social pension-plans available and the socioeconomic- and health-status of the individual in question. At the moment we would like to specify the regression equation as:
Yi = (X + Z )βi + ui (1)
where Y is the retirement age; X is the matrix of “obvious” determinants as specified above; Z is a set of less obvious determinants, perhaps including factors such as political alignment; β is the vector of coefficients on the variables; u is the stochastic error term; and the i subscript indicates the regression applies to population element i.
Europe contains several sets of welfare states. The retirement packages offered in France and Italy vary to those offered in Ireland and the UK, which in turn differ to those available in Scandinavia. This provides further potential for the pro ject. Going beyond simply running state-level regressions, it may be possible to cluster similar states together to verify certain results are not due to unobserved national heterogeneity and thus obtain more robust results.
Additional Hints from Liam:
Details of the survey and data are below
http://www.share-project.org/
Use the 2004 English generic version questionnaire.
Also, there are papers about retirement decisions using the SHARE data on the website
