Content area
Full Text
1_ Introduction
I use matched and unmatched Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego (PME) [Monthly Employment Survey] to study the determinants of male retirement in metropolitan Brazil over the past two decades. My primary interest is to describe the most interesting aspects of male retirement behavior over a relatively long period of time, to develop stylized facts that will help guide future research on this topic, and by using micro-data to consider individual attributes that may affect retirement decisions. These data do not show any specific time trend. I interpret this result as an indication that the reforms of the 1990s did not affect retirement of workers in the metropolitan areas. Also, I concentrated on transitions out of the labor force, I am not capturing those who collect benefits but remain working. Liberato (2003) identifies an increase in the labor force participation of workers who collected pension benefits in the 1990s.
The PME is a very rich source of information to study retirement trends, although not widely used. The matched sample consists of a series of short panel data constructed by matching individual records across adjacent years of the PME. The structure of that data provides me with the opportunity to study the determinants of retirement behavior over time and for different cohorts. The use of the matched data is one of the main contributions of this paper.
The data cover a period of important changes in the labor market and in the public pension system (1984-1999). The pension program was expended in 1988 to cover most of the excluded rural groups and to establish the minimum wage as the minimum benefit and as the benefit adjustment index. In 1998, the Congress approved a new methodology to calculate pension benefits aiming to reduce incentives to early retirement. The system has been characterized by high coverage and low contribution rates. In the past two decades, for the whole country, benefits have increased for all age groups. At the same time, contribution rates have declined dramatically. There was not a significant fall in the labor force participation of older workers (aged 65 and above) from 1984 to 1999 which remains around 30%. An important aspect of the labor market is the decline in the share of the labor force...