Kalemli-Ozcan Sebnem, Weil David N
University of Houston and NBER.
Brown University and NBER.
J Econ Growth (Boston). 2010 Mar;15(1). doi: 10.1007/s10887-010-9050-1.
We examine the role of declining mortality in explaining the rise of retirement over the course of the 20th century. We construct a model in which individuals make labor/leisure choices over their lifetimes subject to uncertainty about their dates of death. In an environment with high mortality, an individual who saves for retirement faces a high risk of dying before he can enjoy his planned leisure. In this case, the optimal plan is for people to work until they die. As mortality falls, however, it becomes optimal to plan, and save for, retirement. We analyze our model using two mathematical formulations of the survival function as well as data on actual changes in the US life table over the last century, and show that this "uncertainty effect" of declining mortality would have more than outweighed the "horizon effect" by which rising life expectancy would have led to later retirement.
我们研究了死亡率下降在解释20世纪退休率上升过程中所起的作用。我们构建了一个模型，在该模型中，个体在其一生中做出劳动/休闲选择，同时面临死亡日期不确定的情况。在高死亡率环境下，为退休储蓄的个体面临着在享受计划中的休闲之前死亡的高风险。在这种情况下，最优计划是人们工作到死。然而，随着死亡率下降，为退休进行规划和储蓄就变得最优。我们使用生存函数的两种数学公式以及上个世纪美国生命表的实际变化数据来分析我们的模型，并表明死亡率下降带来的这种“不确定性效应”将大大超过预期寿命增加导致退休延迟的“期限效应”。
