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Abstract
This paper examines whether workers value the opportunity to lock in current pension rules before future restrictive reforms can occur. We study a one-time early retirement offer made in 2017 by a large Italian bank, which allowed eligible workers to leave employment before retirement, receive a pension-equivalent transfer, and secure the pension rules in force at entry. Take-up declines with the financial cost of acceptance but rises with years to retirement eligibility. Conditional on total income loss, retirement-age fixed effects, and demographic and job controls, an additional year to retirement is associated with a 5.4 percentage-point higher probability of acceptance. This pattern is difficult to reconcile with a standard retirement model under certainty, but can arise when workers value the option to lock in current rules and exposure to future reforms increases with distance to retirement. We discuss alternative explanations, including job insecurity, outside employment, liquidity needs, age-related work disutility, and dynamic selection, finding limited support. In reduced-form terms, the impact on take-up of one additional year of exposure to possible rule changes equals the variation associated to a reduction in annual income loss of about €750.