Early retirement decisions: Lessons from a dynamic structural modelling

Early retirement has many causes according to economic and sociological literature. These causes may be the preference for leisure, nancial and health conditions, and social environment. In our paper, we aim to specify and estimate an econometric model to assess the early retirement decision-making process for aged workers. We specify a worker's utility function from which we derive worker's probability to retire earlier that depends on her health stock, estate value and preference for future. We also estimate an health production and an health consumption functions that are key factors in the individual's decision to retire earlier. Thus, we show that our model disentangles between three groups of workers: (i) those who choose early retirement, (ii) those who will never choose early retirement and (iii) those who are uncertain about early retirement. We also show that our predicted early retirement probability is a good predictor of early retirement as it is causal for observed early retirement.