Does social security reform reduce gains from increasing the retirement age?

The objective of this paper is to analyze the welfare effects of raising the retirement age. With aging populations, in many countries de iure retirement age has been raised. With a standard assumption that individuals prefer leisure to work, such policy necessitates some welfare deterioration. This could be outweighed by lower taxation (defined benefit schemes becoming more balanced) or higher pension benefits (defined contribution schemes yield higher effective replacement rate). Moreover, it is often argued that actuarially fair pension systems provide sufficient incentives for individuals to extend the number of working years, which undermines the need to change de iure retirement age. In this paper we construct an OLG model in which we analyze welfare effects of extending the retirement age under PAYG defined benefit, PAYG defined contribution and partially funded defined contribution pension schemes. We find that such policy is universally welfare improving. However, postponed retirement translates to lower savings, which implies decrease in per capita capital and output.