This paper examines the impact of old-age pension systems and other social transfer programmes on the retirement decision of older males in OECD countries. For each of the 55-59, 60-64 and 65+ age groups, a new panel dataset of retirement incentives embedded in those schemes is constructed, focusing mainly on the implicit tax rate on continued work. These currently differ widely across OECD countries: they are high in most Continental European Countries, compared with Japan, Korea, English-speaking and Nordic countries. Simple cross-country correlations and panel data econometric estimates both show that implicit taxes on continued work have sizeable effects on the departure of older male workers from the labour force ...