Permanent wage cost subsidies for older workers: an effective tool for increasing working time and postponing early retirement?
Albanese, Andrea ; Cockx, Bart
Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn
IZA - Bonn
2015
43 p.
employment ; older worker ; retirement age ; statistics ; wage incentive ; employment subsidy
Discussion Paper
8988
Older people
English
Bibliogr.
"In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage. We estimate these effects by integrating Inverse Probability Weighting in a, possibly trend-adjusted, Difference-in-Differences of endogenously sampled repeated cross sections. We find small positive short-run impacts on working time and larger ones on the employment rate, but only for employees at high risk of leaving to early retirement. The wage is not affected."
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