Many governments are aiming to extend working lives by raising the age at which people can claim retirement pensions. This makes it vital to understand how these policies affect retirement decisions. In this paper, I revisit the labor supply effects of a major Australian reform that increased women’s pension age from 60 to 65. Atalay and Barrett (2015) studied these effects using repeated household surveys and a differences-in-differences design in which male cohorts form the comparison group. They estimate that the reform increased female labor force participation by 12 percentage points. Using earlier data, I show that the parallel-trends assumption did not hold before the reform because of a strong female-specific trend in participation rates across the relevant cohorts. Accounting for this trend, the estimated effect on female participation falls by two-thirds and becomes statistically insignificant at conventional levels. This highlights the importance of carefully assessing and controlling for trends across cohorts when evaluating pension reforms, which are typically phased in across cohorts.

许多政府的目标是通过提高人们可以申请退休金的年龄来延长工作寿命。因此，了解这些政策如何影响退休决定至关重要。在本文中，我回顾了一项重大的澳大利亚改革对劳动力的供给影响，该项改革将女性的退休年龄从60岁提高至65岁。Atalay和Barrett（2015）使用反复的家庭调查和采用男性差异的差异设计研究了这些效应。组成比较组。他们估计，改革使女性劳动力参与率提高了12个百分点。使用较早的数据，我表明，由于相关人群中女性参与率的强烈趋势，改革前的平行趋势假设不成立。考虑到这一趋势，对女性参与的估计影响下降了三分之二，在常规水平上在统计学上微不足道。这凸显了在评估养老金改革时，仔细评估和控制跨人群趋势的重要性，这些改革通常在跨人群中分阶段进行。