One of the most prominent trends in OECD countries over the last 30 years has been the sharp increase in incidence of early retirement, and in particular the permanent take-up of disability benefits. In this paper we construct a theoretical model that shows how occupational choices, in terms of the associated health risks, made by the young can be affected by the expected provision of publicly funded disability benefits in later life. We find that because individuals are risk-averse, they take insufficient risks in the absence of insurance. Disability benefits lead to riskier aggregate behaviour, which in turn increases output and welfare at low levels of benefits, but will lead to excessive risk taking at high benefit levels to the detriment of output and welfare. We also show that the full impact of changes to the generosity of disability benefits in terms of increasing the take-up of such benefits is not immediate, but may take many years to realise because the previous career choices are largely irreversible. This time lag is consistent with the experiences of a number of countries over the last 30 years.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology in its series Paul Frijters Discussion Papers with number
2001-1.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
COILE, Courtney & DIAMOND, Peter & GRUBER, Jonathan & JOUSTEN, Alain, 2000.
"Delays in claiming social security benefits,"
CORE Discussion Papers
2000029, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
[Downloadable!]