The determinants of male retirement in urban Brazil

Abstract

I use matched and unmatched PME data to study the determinants of male's retirement over the past two decades. The PME is a very rich source of data, although not very used. The matched data consists of a series of short panel data constructed by matching individual records across adjacent years of the PME. Some patterns I find are not surprising. For example, probability of being retired increases monotonically with age, and the strong dependence of labor transition on other individual characteristics such as education. Some other patterns are more interesting and surprising. The labor force participation rates of older workers in the main metropolitan areas are lower than what is observed in the rest of the country. The main explanation is that workers in the main metropolitan areas had earlier enrollment into the system and they also have better access to early retirement benefits. I also observed an inverse U-shaped relation between education and retirement. Less and more educated workers have similar retirement patterns during the period studied. Last, I find that more educated workers, and those in the formal sector, have higher retirement probabilities than less educated and those in the informal labor market.