Several studies show that employees with firm-specific skills are more likely to be covered by employer-sponsored pension schemes than workers with general skills. Therefore it can be expected that workers with firm-specific skills retire earlier. This paper tests this prediction using US data...

Utilizing a new survey of employers, this paper examines how and why establishments differ in their willingness to permit an older full-time white-collar worker to take phased retirement. Phased retirement means that an older worker remains with his or her employer while gradually reducing work...

This paper uses a telephone survey of 950 employers to examine employer-side restrictions on phased retirement. Not only did the survey collect information on establishment level policies, it also asked questions about a specific worker’s opportunity for phased retirement. The paper uses these...

The debate about mandatory retirement is fundamentally a moral issue, about human rights, but one strongly related to several major economic issues. Mandatory retirement is a form of age discrimination that seems to be strictly prohibited by section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights. But...

Using a novel dataset from the 2006 Portuguese Labor Force Survey this paper examines the impact of a voluntary reduction in hours of work, before retirement, on the moment of exit from the labor force. If, as often suggested, flexibility in hours of work is a useful measure to postpone...

In this paper we study retirement decisions and more specifically, the influence of a partner’s labour market status on this decision. We use information from three waves of the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), providing information on a wide range of variables,...

This paper uses panel data from the pan-European SHARE survey to study labor market behavior of older male self-employed vis-a-vis wage employed workers. We find the self-employed to work longer hours, to be more flexible in their hours allocation, and to retire later in all countries. We relate...

We estimate and explain the impact of early retirement of husbands on their wives’ probability to retire within one year, using administrative micro panel data that cover the whole Dutch population. We employ an instrumental variable approach in which the retirement choice of husbands is...

We estimate and explain the impact of early retirement of husbands on their wives’ probability to retire within one year, using administrative micro panel data that cover the whole Dutch population. We employ an instrumental variable approach in which the retirement choice of husbands is...

Along with rapid growth and improved standards of living, the first decades of the twentieth century saw the introduction of new technology and new ways to organize production. There are contrasting views on what impact these developments, often summarized as the Second Industrial Revolution,...