Retirement: Institutional Pathways and Individual Trajectories in Britain and Germany

Abstract

Since the 1970s people have retired increasingly early across advanced societies. Parallel to this trend, numerous institutional early retirement pathways evolved, such as bridge unemployment and pre-retirement schemes. This article compares retirement in Britain and Germany to show how individuals progress through these institutional retirement pathways. The analysis uses longitudinal data and recent innovations in sequence analysis to capture the sequential nature of retirement as a series of transitions over time. As expected, prominent institutional retirement pathways are mirrored in individual retirement trajectories. Beyond these expected patterns, there are pronounced regularities in individual retirement trajectories outside of explicit institutional pathways. The ‘institution of the family’ is an additional powerful force in structuring women's retirement. Access to advantageous institutional retirement pathways is stratified by gender, education, income, and health. The article concludes that specific population groups, particularly women, are systematically excluded from protective institutional early retirement pathways in Britain and Germany.

Research on Students' Performance in Higher Education through Sequence Analysis

“…Sequence analysis is also relevant to [8][9][10]2016 understand to what extent one trajectory differs from another ; therefore, this statistical technique can reveal whether the institutional complementarity works for different degree of individual risks. In a second step, cluster analysis is used to reduced the complexity of the results of sequence analysis by clustering together the most similar trajectories.…”

“…The majority of respondents (90%) have the subsequence when there are no events. This means that 10% of people have some events at the age of 9 15. The next popular subsequences (more than 20% each) are transitions from noevents status to the first job, education and leaving parents.…”

“…Mroz and Savage (2006) find that unemployment continues to negatively affects earnings up to ten years later. Thus, the choice to forego college does not only increase the LaCOSA II, Lausanne, June [8][9][10]2016 10 risk of unemployment, but also decreases future earnings compared to those with a college degree. Indeed, income studies have demonstrated that those with higher educational attainment have on average higher earnings and that the gaps between those with and without a college degree are expanding (Taylor et al, 2011).…”

“…For all these analyses we have used information relative to the educational qualification 8 , job (sector, class position, fulltime/part-time), area of residence 9 , dimension of town 10 , age, the presence of children.…”

“…What seems to distinguish the two clusters is that the probability of being a member of cluster 2 increases with the woman's age and with the presence of young children (0)(1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14), while for the couples in cluster 4 the woman's age does not matter and they are more likely not to have a child. There are also differences of occupational sector and class between the couples in clusters 2 and 4.…”