Occupations and Work Characteristics: Effects on Retirement Expectations and Timing

Brooke Helppie McFall, Amanda Sonnega, Robert J. Willis and Peter Hudomiet
Additional contact information
Brooke Helppie McFall: University of Michigan
Amanda Sonnega: University of Michigan
Robert J. Willis: University of Michigan

Working Papers from University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center

Abstract: Population aging and attendant pressures on public budgets have spurred considerable interest in understanding factors that influence retirement timing. A range of sociodemographic and economic characteristics have been shown to predict both earlier and later retirement. Less is known about the role of occupations and their characteristics on the work choices of older workers. Knowing more about the occupations that workers seem to stay in longer or leave earlier may point the way to policy interventions that are beneficial to both individuals and system finances. This project uses detailed occupational categories and work characteristics in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) linked to information in the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to examine compositional changes in occupations held by older workers over time; to provide some basic and interesting information about relationships between occupations and their characteristics and retirement expectations and outcomes; and to shed some light on which occupations and associated characteristics might encourage or discourage longer working lives. There are large percentage changes (increases in decreases) in the percentage of older workers in occupations over time. Considering detailed as opposed to aggregated occupational categories yields interesting additional information. Jobs that HRS respondents say entail less physical effort, less stress, and jobs that have not increased in difficulty in recent decades, and those in which people can reduce hours if desired, are associated with longer work. While the traditional blue collar-retire earlier and white collar-work longer associations emerge, we find interesting exceptions that suggest fruitful directions for future research.

Pages: 64 pages
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp331.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp331.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp331.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:mrr:papers:wp331

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MRRC Administrator ().