Older Americans are now working longer than pre-1980s trends would have predicted. Given concerns about the traditional sources of retirement income (Social Security, employer pensions, and prior savings), older Americans may have to rely more on earnings. This article suggests that many are already doing so by moving to bridge jobs after leaving their career employment.

The "do-it-yourself" approach to retirement planning-with individuals managing a large portion of their retirement finances-is now common among older Americans. This change in the retirement environment, combined with a significant and persistent cyclical downturn, may have long-lasting effects and suggests that the concept of retirement in the United States will continue to evolve.

Do the retirement patterns of public-sector workers differ from those in the private sector? Most private-sector workers today face a do-it-yourself retirement income landscape characterized by an exposure to market forces through defined-contribution pension plans and private saving, and the risk of financial insecurity later in life. Public-sector workers, in contrast, are typically covered by defined-benefit pension plans that both encourage retirement at relatively young ages and offer financial security at older ages. As a result, the consequences of private-and publicsector workers' retirement decisions could differ in important ways. For workers generally, and for private-sector workers in particular, a focus among researchers and policymakers has been the importance of continued work later in life for improving financial security at older ages. Such concerns might be of less consequence for public-sector workers due to the prevalence of defined-benefit pensions. Public-sector workers' departures from the labor force might also differ from those in the private sector, all else equal, because of the age-specific incentives within their defined-benefit plans. Despite these important differences, the privatepublic distinction has received relatively little attention in the retirement literature. Our paper examines how private-and public-sector workers transition from career employment to complete labor force withdrawal, with a focus on the role of bridge employment, phased retirement, and re-entry. We identify the prevalence and determinants of each pathway to retirement using longitudinal data on four cohorts of private-and public-sector career older workers from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Our findings suggest that the prevalence of work after leaving career employment among public-sector workers resembles that of privatesector workers, although with a higher prevalence of part-time bridge employment, a result that has important implications for public policy as the pace of societal aging accelerates.

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The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, part of a consortium that includes parallel centers at the University of Michigan and the National Bureau of Economic Research, was established in 1998 through a grant from the Social Security Administration. The Center's mission is to produce first-class research and forge a strong link between the academic community and decision makers in the public and private sectors around an issue of critical importance to the nation's future. To achieve this mission, the Center sponsors a wide variety of research projects, transmits new findings to a broad audience, trains new scholars, and broadens access to valuable data sources.

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Considerable prior research has shown that the majority of older Americans with career employment do not exit the labor force directly from that career job. Rather, most move first to another job late in life, before complete labor force withdrawal. These intermediate jobs have been labeled "bridge jobs" because they are assumed to be a bridge to complete retirement. One criticism of this research is that bridge job activity may be overstated because the definition of a bridge job in the existing literature does not require a change in occupation. For some, the "bridge job" may just be another in a series of job changes, and not a prelude to retirement. This paper investigates the extent to which bridge jobs involve a change in occupation or a switch to part-time status, both of which may signal the start of a retirement transition, as opposed to continued career employment, albeit with a different employer. We utilize the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally-representative longitudinal dataset of older Americans that began in 1992. Among HRS respondents who were on a full-time career job at the time of the first interview and who changed jobs in subsequent waves, 48 percent of the men and 39 percent of the women also changed the (2-digit) occupation at the time of their first transition. Further, when hours worked are also considered, about three quarters of men and women experienced a change in occupation and/or a switch from full-time to part-time status. When all transitions after the career job are included, 8 out of 10 men and women either changed occupations, reduced hours to part time, or both. Finally, an examination of those career workers who changed jobs within the same occupation and who continued to work full time reveals that they more resemble those who took bridge jobs than those who remained on their full-time career job. We conclude that the vast majority of career workers who changed jobs later in life did in fact do so as part of a retirement transition. Ignoring these subtleties does result in an overestimate of bridge job activity, but only a modest one.