Bridge Jobs: A Comparison across Cohorts

Michael Giandrea, Kevin Cahill and Joseph Quinn ()

No 670, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: Are today's youngest retirees following in the footsteps of their older peers with respect to gradual retirement? Recent evidence from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) suggests that most older Americans with full-time career jobs later in life transitioned to another job prior to complete labor force withdrawal. This paper explores the retirement patterns of a younger cohort of individuals from the HRS known as the "War Babies." These survey respondents were born between 1942 and 1947 and were 57 to 62 years of age at the time of their fourth bi-annual HRS interview in 2004. We compare the War Babies to an older cohort of HRS respondents and find that, for the most part, the War Babies have followed the gradual-retirement trends of their slightly older predecessors. Traditional one-time, permanent retirements appear to be fading, a sign that the impact of changes in the retirement income landscape since the 1980s continues to unfold.

Keywords: Economics of Aging; Partial Retirement; Gradual Retirement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H55 J14 J26 J32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2007-05-30, Revised 2008-12-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lab
Note: Previously circulated as "An Update on Bridge Jobs: the HRS War Babies"
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:bocoec:670

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