IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hka/wpaper/2025-005.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Flexible Retirement and Optimal Taxation

Author

Listed:
  • Abdoulaye Ndiaye

    (New York University)

  • Zhixiu Yu

    (Louisiana State University)

Abstract

Raising the retirement age is a common policy response when social security schemes face fiscal pressures. We develop and estimate a dynamic life cycle model to study optimal retirement and tax policy when individuals face health shocks and income risk and make endogenous retirement decisions. The model incorporates key features of Social Security, Medicare, income taxation, and savings incentives and distinguishes three channels through which health affects retirement: nonconvexities in labor supply due to health-dependent fixed costs of working, earnings reductions, and mortality risk. We estimate our model to match US microdata and show that labor supply nonconvexities play a dominant role in driving early retirement, making rigid increases in the retirement age welfare reducing. In contrast, more flexible policies, such as increasing the dependence of Social Security benefits on the claiming age, can improve welfare and pay for themselves with a fiscal surplus. We map a range of policy reforms to their marginal values of public funds (MVPFs), showing that certain incentives to delay claiming offer MVPFs of infinity while broad-based retirement age increases have negative willingness-to-pay. These findings offer novel retirement policy prescriptions and challenge the prevailing emphasis on raising the retirement age.

Suggested Citation

  • Abdoulaye Ndiaye & Zhixiu Yu, 2025. "Flexible Retirement and Optimal Taxation," Working Papers 2025-005, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
  • Handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2025-005
    Note: M
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Ndiaye_Yu_2025_flex-retirement-opt-tax.pdf
    File Function: First version, May 21, 2025
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J26 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Retirement; Retirement Policies
    • H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions
    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2025-005. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jennifer Pachon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mfichus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.