What Explains Trends in Labor Force Participation of Older Men in the United States?

David Blau and Ryan Goodstein ()

No 2991, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: After nearly a full century of decline, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of older men in the United States leveled off in the 1980s, and began to increase in the late 1990s. We use a time series of cross sections from 1962 to 2005 to model the LFPR of men aged 55-69, with the aim of explaining these trends. We investigate the effects of changes in Social Security rules, lifetime earnings, pension coverage, wages, health, health insurance, and the educational composition of the labor force. Our results indicate that the decline in the LFPR from the 1960s through the 1980s cannot be explained by any of these factors. The recent increase in the LFPR of older men can be explained by changes in the composition of the older male population away from high school dropouts and toward college attendees and graduates. Changes in Social Security may have contributed to the recent increase as well, but the results for Social Security are sensitive to specification.

Keywords: social security; retirement; labor force participation; pensions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2007-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - revised version published as 'Can Social Security Explain Trends in Labor Force Participation of older Men in the United States?' in: Journal of Human Resources, 2010, 45 (2), 328 - 363

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2991.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp2991

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().