Declining bargaining power of workers and the rise of early retirement in Europe

We offer an alternative explanation for the decline in labor force participation of senior workers. Typically, tax and transfer explanations have been proposed. On the contrary, a model with imperfectly competitive labor market allows to consider as well the effects of a drop in bargaining power, which would not be possible in a purely neoclassical framework. We find that a decline in the bargaining power of workers, which has taken place in the last four decades, has largely contributed to the rise in inactivity in Europe. However, we need a combination of these two explanations, along with population aging and a fall in the matching efficiency, in order to correctly reproduce the joint evolutions of other labor market variables such as the employment and unemployment rates.