Search Results
Journal Article
Does a trend toward early retirement create problems for the economy?
Many politicians, gerontologists, and editorial writers have come to deplore the trend toward early retirement. This trend, which began after World War II and accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, has led to a dramatic decline in work effort and earnings among the elderly. Opponents of early retirement believe that keeping people in the work force longer will raise the nations output, reduce the costs of Social Security, and improve the well-being of older Americans. ; This article takes a closer look at the economic arguments behind the widespread call for continued employment of older ...
Conference Paper
Social Security reform in a global context
Conference Paper
Demographic shocks and global factor flows: discussion
A paper-giver's job is straightforward. It is to describe some interesting phenomenon or mechanism or effect, make large claims about its importance for our understanding of the world, and then marshal evidence to show these claims are true. ; Jeffrey Williamson has done his job wonderfully well. He knows much more about economic history than I do, so I can only defer to his deep knowledge. But I find it surprising that the mechanism described in this paper accounts for such a large fraction of the phenomena examined. Let me oversimplify the paper by baldly stating its hypothesis. Then I will ...