Modelling retirement behaviour is a key challenge for both practitioners and researchers.
For pension scheme managers, it is indeed crucial to be able to make long-term projections of the financial equilibrium – or imbalance – of the schemes for which they are responsible, and the impact of changes in retirement behaviour in response to planned changes in pension scales is considerable.
For academics, particularly in the fields of public economics or labour economics, understanding how individuals make decisions about leaving the labour market remains a highly topical research objective. Research has shed light on the intertemporal dimension of the decision to retire, but the explanatory power of the models remains limited, both in terms of explaining changes over time and international differences in retirement behaviour.
In this context, studying the retirement behaviour of civil servants in the French state civil service offers the potential to make progress on both these fronts. Indeed, little research has been carried out on civil servants using French data. The fact that civil servants in France may remain in employment until their desired retirement age enables researchers to rule out labour demand effects, which are often difficult to model convincingly and which, for private-sector employees, are likely to play a significant role in decisions regarding the timing of pension claims. This advantage is offset by a characteristic of the civil service pension scale, which is heavily influenced by age limits and is therefore less likely to involve a financial trade-off between continuing to work and taking retirement. The 2003 reform and its aftermath altered the incentives for retirement in the civil service, suggesting an increased capacity for estimating models of retirement behaviour.
