The Retirement Life Course in America at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

As the baby boom cohorts expand the number of U.S. retirees, population estimates of the employment, withdrawal and reentry behaviors of older Americans' remain scarce. How long do people work? How frequently is retirement reversed? How many years are people retired? What is the modal age of retirement? And, how do the patterns for women compare to those for men? Using the 1992-2004 Health and Retirement Study, we estimate multistate working life tables to update information on the age-graded regularities of the retirement life course of men and women in the United States. We find that at age 50 men can expect to spend half of their remaining lives working for pay, while women can expect to spend just one-third. Half of all men and women have left the labor force by ages 63 and 61, respectively. Although the majority of retirement exits are final, variation in the nature and duration of the retirement process is substantial, as about a third of men's and women's exits are reversed. By quantifying these patterns for men and women, we provide a sound empirical basis for evaluating policy designed to address the financial pressures population aging places on public and private pension systems. KeywordsRetirement; Disability; Labor force; Life course; Gender; Multistate life tables Through the mid-twentieth century retirement was relatively uncommon (Costa 1998), an event replete with uncertainties-higher risks of poverty, morbidity and vague expectations of disengagement. However, automatic adjustment of Social Security benefits and wageindexing of earnings histories, coupled with mandatory retirement ages and the growth of defined-benefit pension plans, solidified retirement as a clearly defined normative phase of the life course (Atchley 1982;Guillemard and Rein 1993;Henretta 1992;Wise 2004 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptAs the twentieth century closed, however, the institutional uniformity of retirement had weakened. The abolition of mandatory retirement ages, proliferation of employer definedbenefit pension plans and one-time early retirement incentives, and secular improvement in financial standing that made retirement more affordable, all combined to shift the risks of old age economic security back toward individuals (Han and Moen 1999;Henretta 1992;Shuey and O'Rand 2004). Indeed, uncertainty is again a ubiquitous feature of retirement (Blossfeld et al. 2006;Hardy 2006). With retirement loosened from institutional schedules, and firmly entrenched as a phase of the life course (Costa 1998;Hardy 2002), variability in late career employment patterns has increased. The result is increased heterogeneity in the timing, permanency, and duration of the retirement life course.Despite recognition that retirement is increasingly individualized (Guillemard and Rein 1993;Han and Moen 1999), as described by numerous studies analyzing individual-level retirement behavior, scholarly attention to documenting the ensuing demographic regularities of older American's work and r...

The Legacy of the Great Recession in Italy: A Wider Geographical, Gender, and Generational Gap in Working Life Expectancy

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