Robert L. Clark – författare

Colleges and universities across the country face huge challenges as their faculties age, their budgets stagnate, and mandatory retirement becomes a thing of the past. In To Retire or Not? the nation''s foremost authorities on retirement policy and practice provide a critical assessment of academic labor markets and retirement patterns, explaining how to adjust pension and other incentive programs to ensure proper replenishment of intellectual and human capital. Case studies vividly illustrate how to predict the need for special retirement programs, how to structure voluntary early-out benefit plans, and how age-based retirement incentives work in practice. Recent legal decisions are assessed and critiqued.A recent amendment to the U.S. Age Discrimination in Employment Act ended mandatory retirement for tenured faculty at colleges and universities across the country. This law let individual faculty members enjoy an economic benefit enjoyed by almost all other American workers: they could choose to continue working past age 70 or "sell" the benefit back to their universities in exchange for earlier retirement. At the same time, however, educational administrators were faced with a faculty bulge created by the expansion of the professorate in the 1960s and early ''70s, and the so-called "surplus army" of Ph.D.s of the 1980s. Colleges and universities everywhere are now faced with the higher costs of retaining senior professors instead of hiring entry-level replacements at lower salaries.

International contributors comparatively analyze government approaches to population aging, illustrating the similar challenges faced across nations. Chapters draw attention to those particular issues that public policy plans must surmount, including funding pressures on retirement plans and the effects of an aging labor force on economic growth and productivity. They offer evidence on the scale of these challenges in Korea and the US and empirically evaluate how governments, employers, and individuals may respond to these issues in the years to come. Addressing fiscal sustainability and key social security programs, including the implications of the 2015 Korean pension reform and the economic difficulties entailed by the future of Medicare, this book investigates the implications of managing and sustaining welfare for an aging population.

This cutting-edge book will be ideal reading for economists focusing on public policy and welfare programs, benefiting from the comparative approach to fiscal accountability and sustainability. It will also appeal to practitioners and policymakers seeking insights into the consequences of an aging population and hoping to develop innovative methods and approaches to welfare.

The contributors draw on the experience of the developing and industrialized worlds and on countries in Asia, North America, and Europe. They offer new evidence about micro-level responses of labor force participation, earnings, and savings to actual and/or perceived demographic change. Their broad perspective on population aging spans the entire demographic transition and demonstrates the importance of effective policy response in the early stages of population aging. Also included are policy analyses that explore the use of tax policy, financial reform, and policies targeting immigration and procreation.

This insightful study will prove invaluable to students and scholars of population economics, public sector economics, welfare economics, social economics, and public finance. Pension analysts and government policymakers will find the material of great practical use.