قوانین بازنشستگی اجباری و تصمیم گیری بازنشستگی استادان دانشگاه در کانادا

We examine the impact of mandatory retirement on the retirement decisions of professors in Canada using administrative data. Estimation of a discrete time hazard model indicates that faculty members at universities with mandatory retirement at age 65 have exit rates at age 65 that are around 30 to 38 percentage points higher than those of their counterparts at universities without mandatory retirement. This overall difference in exit rates is found when the sample is restricted by discipline, professional rank and type of university. Similar results are found for both men and women; however, the magnitude of this effect is somewhat smaller for women. Restricting the analysis to include faculty members who received their highest degree at age 34 or older does not affect the magnitude of the difference in exit rates between faculty at universities without mandatory retirement and those at universities with mandatory retirement. The estimated survival probabilities indicate that only 22.7% of faculty members employed at age 64 at universities without mandatory retirement will continue to be employed at the same university at age 72.

The aging of the population in many western countries has fuelled the debate regarding the elimination of laws that force retirement at a specific age. Although mandatory retirement has been banned in the US, Australia and New Zealand, mandatory retirement is still allowed in many countries. In particular, given the requirement of European Union countries to eliminate employment based age discrimination (by December 2006), there has recently been a large amount of debate in Europe about the legality, as well as the merits, of mandatory retirement laws. The changing age structure has particularly strong implications for the university sector. In countries such as Canada and the United States, professors, hired initially to teach the baby boom generation, are now reaching retirement age. This aging trend is fuelling an ongoing discussion in universities in Canada which are allowed to enforce retirement at 65 about whether mandatory retirement should be abolished. Consequently, it is crucial to have a complete understanding of how the elimination of mandatory retirement rules affects the retirement propensities of professors. Due to a general lack of suitable data, the retirement decision of university faculty members has not received a great deal of attention in the economics literature. An important exception is the study by Ashenfelter and Card (2002) of US faculty retirement patterns. The data employed by Ashenfelter and Card originate from a special survey carried out on 16,000 older faculty in the US called the Faculty Retirement Survey (FRS). These data combine payroll records from individual institutions with pension information from the TIAA-CREF pension plan. The survey is based upon older faculty at a random sample of four-year colleges and universities in the mid-1980s. The faculty members are followed for 10 to 11 years overlapping the period of the elimination of mandatory retirement in the US in 1994. They find strong evidence that the abolition of mandatory retirement (at the age of 70) in the United States led to a substantial increase in the fraction of university professors still working into their seventies. In particular, the retirement rates of 70 and 71 year olds fell by two thirds to a level comparable with those of 69-year-old faculty members. They conclude that American universities and colleges will experience a rise in the number of older professors in the future due to the elimination of mandatory retirement. Using the same econometric approach as Ashenfelter and Card, 2002 and Clark and Ghent, 2008 explore the robustness of these results using data from the University of North Carolina system. Consistent with the findings of Ashenfelter and Card (2002), the elimination of mandatory retirement for university faculty is found to result in a sharp decline in the probability of retirement for university faculty. They find that the drop in retirement rates at age 70 and 71 after the elimination of mandatory retirement was greater for faculty who were participating in the state defined benefit pension scheme than for those in the defined contribution scheme.1 Despite being an important policy issue, there is little research on the impact of mandatory retirement on the age of retirement of academics outside of the two US studies cited above. One exception is the study by Labini and Zapperi (2007) who show that in Italy where the mandatory retirement age can be as high as 75, almost 25% of faculty are 60 years of age or older, while in the UK, France and Spain, only 7 to 12% of faculty are in this age range. Our paper makes a number of important contributions to this literature. First, the overall estimation approach follows that of Ashenfelter and Card (2002) and represents an investigation into the overall robustness of their findings when applied to the case of a similar country over a similar time period. Second, the analysis sheds light on the likely impact of the elimination of mandatory retirement policies when the forced retirement age is below the age of 70 (which was the relevant mandatory retirement age for university professors prior to the elimination of mandatory retirement in the US). In many jurisdictions, mandatory retirement policies stipulate retirement at ages below 70 (such as many European countries). Consequently, the results of Ashenfelter and Card (2002) may not shed light on the extent to which faculty are likely to work beyond the usual retirement age of say 65 after the elimination of mandatory retirement. Third, the rich interprovincial variation in the mandatory retirement rules in Canada allows for an alternative source of variation in the retirement rule environment allowing for greater confidence in terms of the estimated relationship between the elimination of mandatory retirement and its impact on the exit behaviour of university faculty. Fourth, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the exit behaviour for men and women separately. Finally, the fact that the data employed originate from a census (carried out by Statistics Canada) of all faculty members within Canada (rather than a survey of university faculty) allows for even greater confidence that the estimated relationships are robust and provide reliable representations of the actual behaviour of university faculty. However, it is important to note that our data does have one main shortcoming relative to the data employed by Ashenfelter and Card (2002). We are unable to distinguish between retirements and other exits from employment at the university. Given the age range of interest, we do not believe that this is an important distinction since the vast majority of exits appear to be into retirement. In addition, unlike Clark and Ghent (2008), we do not have information related to pension eligibility for the individual faculty members in our data.2 The empirical results of this paper indicate that mandatory retirement rules act as a constraint on the decision to continue working at their university beyond the age of 65 for professors at Canadian universities. Faculty members are found to have exit rates from the university at age 64 and 65 that are around 30 to 36 percentage points lower than those of their counterparts at universities with mandatory retirement. Similar results are found for both men and women; however, the magnitude of this effect is somewhat smaller for women. This does not support the view that mandatory retirement is a more severe constraint on the behaviour of female academics who are more likely to have had career interruptions than their male counterparts. However, our data lack information related to spousal characteristics. It may be that differences between male and female faculty in terms of average family income are in fact driving this result. Estimated survival probabilities indicate that male faculty members employed at a university without mandatory retirement at age 64 only have a 22.7% probability of continuing to work at the university until age 72. This indicates that while a significant fraction of professors will work past 65 if allowed to, a relatively small fraction of university professors are likely to stay many years past the usual retirement age of 65.

The implications of mandatory retirement rules on the retirement behaviour of university faculty members have been analyzed using administrative data for Canada. The age distributions of professors at universities without mandatory retirement and those at universities with mandatory retirement at age 65 have diverged over time with a higher fraction of professors over the age of 65 at universities without mandatory retirement. Three main contributions are made. First, the estimates from the estimation of a discrete time hazard model generally support the findings in the two existing (US) studies. In the absence of mandatory retirement, university faculty members are much less likely to retire in the first two years after the usual retirement age. Second, the magnitude of this effect is found to be comparable between women and men. This does not support the view that mandatory retirement is a more severe constraint on the behaviour of female academics who may be more likely to have had career interruptions (relative to their male counterparts). Equivalent results were found by gender group when the sample was restricted to faculty members who received their highest degree at age 34 or older indicating that duration of the remainder of the career does not appear to be an important determinant of the exit rates of either male or female faculty members over the age of 64 at universities without mandatory retirement rules. The earlier studies in this literature do not report comparable results by gender. However, the lack of information related to spousal income means that we cannot fully account for all sources of current income and retirement income. If female faculty members are more likely to be married to spouses with high incomes and generous pensions than are male faculty members then this difference could mask a possible greater need to work past the usual mandatory retirement age on the part of female faculty relative to male faculty. This is an important issue which should be researched in the future hopefully with new sources of data. Third, since Canadian mandatory retirement policies typically involve retirement at age 65 (as opposed to age 70 for the case of the mandatory retirement policy relevant for US academics in the earlier studies), this study provides insights on the impact mandatory retirement rules can have on the retirement behaviour of university academics at earlier ages. Of particular interest, is the fact that the estimated survival probabilities indicate that only 22.7% of faculty members employed at age 64 at universities without mandatory retirement will continue to be employed at the same university at age 72. This finding is in contrast to the US studies that indicate that retirement rates at age 71 and 72 at universities without mandatory retirement were comparable to the retirement rates at age 69 and 70. It may be that this difference between the Canadian and American findings is due to institutional factors, not fully captured by the mandatory retirement policy, having a significant impact on the retirement decisions of university faculty.