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

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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.

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Notes

  1. To gauge the representativeness of the HRS for describing the retirement life course, in preliminary analyses we calculated sex-specific total life expectancies and 5-year labor force participation rates. These HRS calculations largely matched U.S. Government estimates with two exceptions—our calculated life expectancies were marginally greater (<1 year) for women and the observed LFPRs were slightly higher (3–4%) for respondents over 60 than those reported in the U.S. Vital Statistic and Current Population Survey, respectively. These differences are to be expected given that the HRS sampled the non-institutionalized population and higher panel attrition among non-working respondents. Overall, we are confident in the representativeness of the HRS for examining the retirement life course.

  2. This reclassification distinguished between exits prompted by significant health concerns and those motivated by other reasons. Work-disabled persons may adopt the retiree identity because it is socially desirable, especially given that few respondents primarily identified as work-disabled (<4%). Also, RAND (2006) privileged retirement over work-disability in reconciling multiple labor force statuses obscuring self-defined health-mandated exits given that a sizeable minority of respondents classified by RAND as retired also indicated that their health limits their ability to work (20%). Defining respondents as work-disabled if a health limitation prevents them from working is consistent with prior studies. Moreover, ancillary analyses indicated that persons defined as work-disabled in this manner had four times the number of functional limitations as those defined as retired (not shown).

  3. Retired includes respondents who explicitly state that they were “retired,” as well as “homemakers” and those of some “other” status. Discouraged workers—those who would like to be working, but have stopped looking for a job—are unable to be identified in the HRS and are also included with retired workers (consistent with the BLS classification of discouraged workers as out of the labor force). In practical terms, the number of potential discouraged workers was very low; depending on the interview, 10–13% of respondents identified as something other than working, unemployed, work-disabled, or retired and almost all of these (>90%) were women who identified as homemakers. Many older women are reluctant to identify as retired given gendered notions about careers even when they have substantial work histories (Szinovacz and DeViney 1999). We retained these respondents so that our results are directly comparable to estimates from national labor force monitoring agencies.

  4. Defining transitions between interviews does not appear to bias state-specific life expectancy calculations, but potentially underestimates the absolute volume of transitions in multistate life tables (Wolf and Gill 2009). Here, we have no reason to suspect that this observation window fails to detect one transition (e.g., working to retired) more than another (e.g., retired to working) or differentially captures the movements of men and women.

  5. In preliminary analyses, we estimated a single model for each transition rate to verify gender non-proportionalities in Age and found substantial evidence of such non-proportionality in four of the seven transitions (not shown).

  6. To verify the functional form of each transition, we also estimated each hazard rate using a piecewise constant model and plotted the results. These estimates closely conformed to those presented here (not shown).

  7. We calculated the prevalence rate by pooling persons ages 50 to 54 to ensure an adequate number of cases in each origin state. The multistate life table results were relatively invariant to alternate radix allocations based on the prevalence rates at ages 50 to 53 or 50 to 55 (not shown).

  8. It is important to keep in mind we defined work-disability based on self-identification or having a health condition expected to last at least at least 3 months. We would expect little reentry among those receiving Social Security Disability Insurance benefits given the stringent requirements for qualification, including that the health condition is expected to last at least 1 year. Social Security Disability Insurance eligibility is thus structured in a way that explicitly excludes the shorter-term—though clearly important—health-mandated exits identified here.

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Acknowledgements

Research support was provided to D.F. Warner through National Institute on Aging grants T32AG00048 and T32AG00155 and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant T32HD007514. Research support was provided to M.D. Hayward through National Institute on Aging grant R01AG013810. Additional support was provided by grants R01AG11758 and R55AG09311 from the National Institute on Aging and by grants 1R24HD041025 and 5P30HD28263 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We thank Don Gensimore for technical assistance and Alan Booth, Tyson H. Brown, Matthew E. Dupre, Glen H. Elder, Jr., Arie Kapteyn, Jessica Kelley-Moore, Valarie King, Diane McLaughlin, and Tara D. Warner for comments on earlier drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, 44106, USA

    David F. Warner

  2. Center for Family and Demographic Research, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, 43403, USA

    David F. Warner

  3. Department of Sociology, The Population Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Mark D. Hayward

  4. Department of Sociology, Center for Life Course, Health, and Aging Research, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Melissa A. Hardy

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  1. David F. Warner
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Correspondence to David F. Warner.

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A previous version of the paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston, MA, August 2008.

Appendices

Appendix A: Measurement of Labor Force Status in the 1993 Ahead

Respondents over the age of 70 were first interviewed in 1993 as part of the Assessment of Health Dynamics among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) study, initiated as a companion to the original HRS. Unfortunately, the 1993 AHEAD interview asked only whether the respondent was working for pay; it was not until 1995, after the decision to merge the AHEAD with the HRS (see HRS 2008), that other labor force statuses were ascertained. While RAND (2006) backfilled information to make Wave 1 classifications, the 1993 labor force status of 3,111 non-working AHEAD respondents remained unknown because they died (n = 786), attrited (n = 347), or had “not worked in the last 2 years” (n = 1,978). Excluding these AHEAD respondents eliminated a disproportionate number of death events and biased the multistate life table expectancies upward. Likewise, assuming these respondents exited via retirement as suggested by RAND (2006), and that consequently none exited through work-disability, upwardly biased the multistate life expectancies. As single-decrement life expectancy estimates were realistic in comparison to U.S. Vital Statistics reports, and the constituent state-specific life expectancies sum to the total life expectancy in the MSLT, it was apparent that the allocation of these AHEAD respondents between the non-working origin states in 1993 was driving the bias in the preliminary multistate life table estimates.

To achieve accurate life expectancy estimates, we assigned an initial labor force status to AHEAD respondents who were out of the labor force in 1993 based on their responses to related sorts of questions. For example, the 1,987 respondents who in 1995 reported that they had not worked in the past 2 years and identified as retired or work-disabled were assigned this status in 1993. We categorized the remaining respondents, who were working, deceased or had attired at the second interview (n = 1,133), as work-disabled or retired depending on their difficulty with five dichotomous indicators of activities of daily living (ADL) in 1993 (i.e., walking one block, climbing a flight of stairs, lifting ten pounds, pushing or pulling a large item, and picking up a dime). We assumed that ADL limitations were a proxy for whether a health condition prevented the respondent from working because a direct measure was not available in 1993. Initially, we categorized respondents as work-disabled in 1993 if they were in the top 10% of the distribution on a summary measure of five standard ADL impairments (four or more impairments for men, five impairments for women), which corresponded to the prevalence of work-disability among AHEAD respondents with a known labor force status. However, this resulted in too few cases in the retired state (given the increase in impairments with age), and a low mortality rate and elevated life expectancy estimates. Thus, we limited work-disability classifications to respondents less than 85 years of age, which yielded accurate life expectancies. We assigned the remaining respondents as retired. Alternative strategies for making these categorizations, including a probabilistic model, did not fit the data as well.

Appendix B: Distribution of Labor Force Events

See Table 3.

Table 3 Distribution of events in the multistate working life table model by sex
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Appendix C: Hazard Model Estimates

See Tables 4, 5.

Table 4 Hazard model estimates for age-specific labor force transition rates, men over 50 in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), 1992–2004
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Table 5 Hazard model estimates for age-specific labor force transition rates, women over 50 in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), 1992–2004
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Warner, D.F., Hayward, M.D. & Hardy, M.A. The Retirement Life Course in America at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century. Popul Res Policy Rev 29, 893–919 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-009-9173-2

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