Political election on legal retirement age

Abstract

We use a lifecycle model in which individuals differ by age and by wage in order to analyze a pairwise majority voting process on the legal retirement age. We consider two different retirement regimes. In the first one the retirees do not return to the labor market, regardless the new retirement age. In the second one, they have to return if thisage is higher than her own age. We show that the final outcome of the voting process will crucially depend on the retirement regime as well as on the parameters of the Social Security, that is, the redistributive character of the system and the present legal retirement age.