The retirement behaviour of the self-employed in Britain

Simon Parker () and Jonathan Rougier

Applied Economics, 2007, vol. 39, issue 6, 697-713

Abstract: We analyze the retirement behaviour of older self-employed workers, using a life cycle framework and a multinomial logit model of dynamic employment and retirement choices. Using data from the two-wave Retirement Survey, we find that greater actual or potential earnings decrease the probability of retirement among the self-employed. In contrast to employees, none of gender, health or family circumstances appear to affect self-employed retirement decisions. The dynamic analysis reveals that relatively few employees and virtually no retirees switch into self-employment in later life. The switches that do occur are motivated less by attempts to use self-employment as a bridge job or 'stepping stone' to full retirement, than by self-employment being a last resort for less affluent workers with job histories of weak attachment to the labour market. We compare self-employed and employee retirement behaviour and discuss the policy implications of our results.

Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00036840500447807 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:39:y:2007:i:6:p:697-713

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036840500447807

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().