Incentives and retirement patterns in Uruguay

Abstract

Using social security administrative records, we estimate indicators of incentives to retire in a sample of males affiliated to the main Uruguayan social security program and we assess their impact on retirement and pension claims observed between 1996 and 2004. In line with standard results in the literature, we find that social security wealth has a highly significant positive impact on the probability of retirement. However the usual indicators of incentives to retirement do not have the expected impact. In some specifications the indicators are not statistically significant and in others the indicators do not present the expected sign.