We use cookies to provide you with the best possible website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site, as well as cookies used for anonymous statistics, comfort settings, or displaying personalized content. You can decide which categories you want to allow. Please note that depending on your settings, some features of the website may not be available.

Cookie settings

These necessary cookies are required to enable the core functionality of the website. Opting out of these cookies is not possible.

cb-enable
This cookie stores the user's cookie consent status for the current domain. Expiry: 1 year.
laravel_session
Stores the session ID to recognize the user when the page reloads and to restore their login session. Expiry: 2 hours.
XSRF-TOKEN
Provides CSRF protection for forms. Expiry: 2 hours.
IZA Discussion Paper No. 15628
October 2022
Old-Age Unemployment and Labor Supply: An Application to Belgium

published in: Empirical Economics, 2024, 67, 253 - 587

Over the last two decades, most OECD countries have reformed their social security in order to make early departures from the labor market increasingly difficult. Despite the fiscal gains that are expected from these reforms, it is likely that these gains from longer careers will be partly offset by increasing expenses on other social security programs. This article sheds light on this issue by ex-ploring the consequences of postponing access to an old-age unemployment program from age 58 to 60. The program provides laid-off workers with a combination of unemployment benefits and a monthly supplement paid by the employer until the full retirement age. Exploiting a rich set of administrative data, we study the effect of this reform on workers' employment and various social security benefits (i.e. unemployment, disability, early retirement and compensated working time reductions), using a triple difference method as identification strategy. Our results show that, for men, the reform had a positive effect on employment, with a small positive effect on a program called Time-Credit, i.e., a social security program that facilitates working time reductions at the end of the career. For women, we find no significant effect on employment but instead a large spillover effect on unemployment. We find that gender differences in job characteristics can help to explain this difference, since women are more likely to work in part-time, low-wage and blue-collar occupations than men, and no significant employment effects are found for these groups of workers.

Kommunikation
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Netzwerkkoordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

Das IZA@LISER-Netzwerk ist eine weltweite Gemeinschaft für exzellente Forschung in der Arbeitsmarktökonomie und angrenzenden Fachgebieten. Nach dem Wechsel von Bonn wird das Netzwerk nun am Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) koordiniert.

Über das IZA@LISER Network
Contact
IZA Network (Current Site Operator):

Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)
11, Porte des Sciences
Maison des Sciences Humaines
L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette / Belval, Luxembourg

IZA Institute (In Liquidation):

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH i. L.
Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 5-9, 53113 Bonn. Germany
Phone: +49 228 3894-0 | Fax: +49 228 3894-510
E-Mail: info@iza.org | Web: www.iza.org
Represented by: Martin T. Clemens (Liquidator)