The Effect of Legal Retirement Age Reform on Retirement Behavior – Analysis and Synthesis of Several Natural Experiments

Abstract We exploit an incremental retirement age reform to investigate the impact of an increase in the legal retirement age on the benefit-claiming age using administrative data from the German public pension insurance. We synthesize findings from several marginal retirement age increases over 10 birth cohorts with a meta-analytic random effects model and find that compliance with marginal treatment is relatively high, but increases if combined with fewer available pathways into retirement. Female retirees retire later in response to a legal retirement age increase than males.