“Cost of getting older”: Wages of older age workers

Abstract

The article focuses on the wage formation of workers in the pre-retirement and retirement age in Russia. For this, the authors analyze age-wage profile and wage differentiation within and between age groups. The study exploits the Sample Survey of Household Incomes and Participation in Social Programs for 2016 which has a large sample and covers all groups of employed in the economy . It measures wages payed during the year 2015, thus allowing estimates for annual as well as hourly wages. Multiple previous studies across developed countries come to the consensus that wages tend to grow over age until late in life, though with decreasing pace. However, this pattern does not show up in Russian data. Earnings peak early in working life and then decline monotonically. By their pre-retirement age, Russian workers find themselves on the declining wage trend. Though this deviation from stylized facts has already been noted in the literature, we explore it using the new and more comprehensive dataset. In addition, our analysis deals with annual earnings as well as hourly wage rates, and it explores trends in hours worked over age. The findings suggest that wage differentiation tends to be higher among older age workers reflecting stronger selection into employment with age. Given the forecast of changes in the age composition of employment by 2025—2030 and assuming the stability of the age-wage profile, we can expect non-trivial reallocation of the aggregate wage fund to the benefit of the middle age group of workers while the old age group is likely be unaffected.