Do Involuntary Longer Working Careers Reduce Well-being?

Lieze Sohier

Applied Research in Quality of Life, 2019, vol. 14, issue 1, No 9, 196 pages

Abstract: Abstract This study examines the impact of working at older age on the individual’s overall well-being. The paper uses microdata from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), and it controls for individual heterogeneity and for changes in the level of well-being during retirement. On average, older workers do not significantly differ from retirees regarding their life satisfaction level. In addition, this study takes into account the worker’s perceived freedom of choice in the decision to work longer (voluntary or forced). In this way, this research identifies a group of workers (“involuntary workers”) who experience a significantly lower level of well-being when continuing to work. After retiring, this group reports greater satisfaction with their lives but continues to suffer from being previously involuntarily employed. As result, these workers continue to be less satisfied with their lives than those who were voluntary workers. These findings have an important implication for the debate on longer working careers. The worker’s perceived freedom of choice in the decision to continue working is a determining factor in the individual well-being of older persons.

Keywords: Life satisfaction; Retirement; Involuntary employment; Longer working careers; Aging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 J26 J28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11482-017-9586-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ariqol:v:14:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s11482-017-9586-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11482

DOI: 10.1007/s11482-017-9586-8

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Research in Quality of Life is currently edited by Daniel Shek

More articles in Applied Research in Quality of Life from Springer, International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().