Minimum Hours Constraints and Retirement Behavior

This paper presents statistics which confirm the existence of minimum hours constraints for jobs held by a majority of prime aged male workers who are not self employed. It then considers the implications of these constraints for studies of retirement behavior and related policy analyses. Potential biases associated with conventional analyses, which either ignore the existence of minimum hours constraints or assume they are pervasive, are discussed in the context of structural life cycle retirement models. A more realistic but still imperfect specification, which can be estimated given available data, assumes minimum hours constraints on the main job and variable hours elsewhere.