Discrimination, Retirement, and Pensions

This text looks at the issues of discriminatiion and retirement, the perception of which is undergoing fundamental changes at the present time. Despite questions of their legitimacy, there is no corresponding decrease in their prevalence and various phenomena are explained, These include; discrimination by gender and in hiring older workers, mandatory retirement policies of firms, vesting and pensions, and early retirement policies. Based on a unifying human capital model of general firm specific skills, and of casual and career jobs and workers, it extends the work of Becker and Okun by considering a framework in which the firm's hiring and retirement policies take into account the replacement of existing workers on any given job by other - male or female, another race or younger - workers. The common fundamental determinants of discrimination and retirement are examined within a unified theory of the optimal ages of hiring and retirement.