TY - JOUR AU - Shoven, John B AU - Slavov, Sita TI - The Role of Retiree Health Insurance in the Early Retirement of Public Sector Employees JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 19563 PY - 2013 Y2 - October 2013 DO - 10.3386/w19563 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19563 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19563.pdf N1 - Author contact info: John B. Shoven Department of Economics Stanford University Landau Economics Building 579 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305 Tel: 650/723-3273 E-Mail: shoven@stanford.edu Sita Slavov Schar School of Policy and Government George Mason University 3351 Fairfax Drive, MS 3B1 Arlington, VA 22201 Tel: 703/993-3171 E-Mail: sslavov@gmu.edu M1 - published as John B. Shoven, Sita Nataraj Slavov. "The Role of Retiree Health Insurance in the Early Retirement of Public Sector Employees," in Robert Clark and Joseph Newhouse, organizers, "State and Local Health Plans for Active and Retired Public Employees" Journal of Health Economics, Volume 38 (2014) M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2014-01-24 M3 - presented at "State and Local Health Plans Conference", August 16-17, 2013 AB - Most private sector workers with employer-provided health insurance have a strong incentive to continue working until Medicare eligibility in order to maintain group health coverage. However, most government employees have access to retiree health coverage, which allows them access to group health coverage even if they retire before Medicare eligibility. We study the impact of retiree health coverage on the probability of stopping work among public sector workers between the ages of 55 and 64. We find that, for state and local government employees, retiree health coverage raises the probability of stopping work by 5.1 percentage points (around 28 percent) between ages 60 and 64. However, we find no evidence that retiree health coverage influences state and local employees' decisions to stop work at ages 55-59, or that such coverage has an effect on the probability of stopping work for federal and military employees. ER -