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Faced with demographic ageing, European policy makers since the mid-s have taken a turn from fostering early retirement to promoting longer working life by reducing early exit incentives and facilitating work continuation. However, it remains open whether these reforms are yet reflected in the retirement plans and preferences of future pensioners' cohorts. Using most recent data on desired retirement ages from the fifth wave of the European Social Survey (/ wave), this paper empirically investigates how far current policy reforms are in line with the retirement age preferences of older workers aged  and over. Results show that older workers approaching retirement ages still intend to retire before the politically envisioned age of , and in many cases also before nationally defined standard retirement ages. Despite visible progress in implementing active ageing measures, the challenge of motivating older workers to continue working until or even beyond retirement ages thus remains. At the same time, there are regime-specific problem groups that face difficulties in adjusting to the active ageing paradigm of longer working life. Especially in countries with little employment support, those with unstable work careers, employment interruptions and few financial resources are at a high risk of being crowded out from late career employment and thus from the possibility of ensuring a decent standard of living in old age.

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Our findings suggest an increase in social inequality in retirement decisions as a result of the policy shift towards activation. We conclude by arguing for a more fine-grained understanding of the reasons why people work longer. Such research would provide valuable insights into how to design future labour market and pension reforms preventing a rise in social inequalities.

Purpose -This paper aims to investigate the effect of flexible working conditions on work-family conflict in European countries. Flexible work has increasingly been used by employers to adapt to the demands of economic competition, often at the expense of employee's demands. Yet, at the same time, flexible work can provide a means to better combine work and family obligations. The paper seeks to explore which of these effects dominates for different types of flexible employment, paying specific attention to gender-specific effects. Design/methodology/approach -For the cross-national analysis of work-life-conflict, the authors employ the latest wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) from 2010, featuring a module on "Family, work and well-being". Binomial logistic regression is used to identify determinants of work-life-conflict both on the micro-and the macro-level. In addition to looking at flexible work forms as a phenomenon per se, specific attention is given to the experience of different types of employment flexibilization throughout the financial crisis. Findings -For both genders, irregularity and unpredictability of working hours negatively impact on work-life conflict beyond the mere amount of working hours. Yet, higher autonomy in choosing one's work time is used very differently: While women tend to use their control over working hours to achieve a better work-life-balance, men tend to use these arrangements to increase their work commitment, thereby enhancing their perceived work-family conflict. The authors argue that this gender-specific use of flexible work arrangements might still reflect the traditional gender roles and gender-segregated labour market structures. Adding to previous literature, the authors furthermore demonstrate that gender-specific differences are also apparent in the effects of the most recent economic crisis. Originality/value -By examining the effects of various types of flexible employment separately for men and women, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the gender-specific effects of flexible work arrangements on work-family-conflict within European countries. The 5th wave of the ESS furthermore for the first time allows an empirical investigation of the effects of the recent financial crisis on work-family conflict from a cross-nationally comparative perspective.

Recent reform efforts of advanced welfare states have attempted to reverse trends in early retirement and increase the statutory retirement age. This paradigm shift often occurred against the protest of unions, firms and their employees. As a consequence of expanding welfare states and as response to economic challenges since the 1970s early exit from work has become a widespread practice. Early retirement has been part of Continental Europe’s welfare without work problem, while the Scandinavian welfare states, the Anglophone liberal economies and the Japanese welfare society were able to maintain higher levels of employment for older workers. Since the 1990s, an international consensus to reverse early exit from work emerged among international organisations and national policy experts. Based on a comparative historical analysis of selected OECD countries, this study analyses the cross-national variations in the institutionalisation of early exit regimes and its recent reversal using macro-indictors on early exit trends and stylised information on institutional arrangements. Comparing the interaction of social policy and economic institutions, it reviews the cross-national differences in welfare state “pull” and economic “push” factors that have contributed to early exit from work and discusses the likely impact of welfare retrenchment and assesses the importance of “retention” factors such as activation policies for decreasing early exit from work.

Many governments world-wide are promoting longer working life due to the social and economic repercussions of demographic change. However, not all workers are equally able to extend their employment careers. Thus, while national policies raise the overall level of labour market participation, they might create new social and labour market inequalities. This paper explores how institutional differences in the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan affect individual retirement decisions on the aggregate level, and variations in individuals´ degree of choice within and across countries. We investigate which groups of workers are disproportionately at risk of being 'pushed' out of employment, and how such inequalities have changed over time. We use comparable national longitudinal survey datasets focusing on the older population in England, Germany and Japan. Results point to cross-national differences in retirement transitions. Retirement transitions in Germany have occurred at an earlier age than in England and Japan. In Japan, the incidence of involuntary retirement is the lowest, reflecting an institutional context prescribing that employers provide employment until pension age, while Germany and England display substantial proportions of involuntary exits triggered by organisational-level redundancies, persistent early retirement plans or individual ill-health.2

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