Full Retirement Research Articles

The Role of Conventional Retirement Age in Retirement Decisions

Existing research on retirement behavior tends to ignore conventional or or retirement ages in the model and estimation, and then ask whether a model which takes no direct account of such conventions can account for the observed spikes in the retirement hazard at age 62 and 65. This paper, in contrast, focuses on a direct measure of retirement age, based on a question that has been included in each wave of the Health and Retirement Study HRS). Using actual survey responses has several advantages: it identifies respondents who say that there is no retirement age for workers like them; it distinguishes between those who regard 62 and those who regard 65 as the relevant age; and it identifies the not insignificant number of workers for whom the usual age is neither 62 nor 65. There is little evidence that workers regard 63, the age at which COBRA coverage could provide a bridge to Medicare eligibility, as conventional, or that those affected by the increase in the age of eligibility for full retirement benefits under Social Security have adopted 66 or 67 as a focal retirement age. Following Wave I HRS respondents for six additional waves (12 years) so that their actual retirement can be observed shows that the actual retirement hazard is substantially higher at (and around) the age that workers identified in Wave I as the retirement age for workers like them. This is true even when we control for actual age at each wave, and for baseline values of earnings, wealth, health, and marital status. The finding that workers are more likely to retire at a particular age if they regard that age as the usual retirement age for workers like them suggests that the direct measures of the usual age may be useful in more formal models of the retirement process. In a world where some workers understand the incentives they face and respond appropriately, but others are poorly informed and overwhelmed by the choices they face, the retirement age may be a starting point for modeling the behavior of the latter group of workers.

Antecedents of bridge employment: A longitudinal investigation.

Bridge employment is the labor force participation pattern increasingly observed in older workers between their career jobs and their complete labor force withdrawal. It serves as a transition process from career employment to full retirement. Typical bridge employment decisions include full retirement, career bridge employment, and bridge employment in a different field. In the current study, 3 dominant theories (i.e., role theory, continuity theory, and life course perspective) on retirement processes were reviewed. On the basis of these theories, the authors proposed 4 categories of antecedents (i.e., individual attributes, job-related psychological variables, family-related variables, and a retirement-planning-related variable) of different types of bridge employment decisions. The authors used longitudinal data of a large, nationally representative sample from the Health and Retirement Study (F. Juster & R. Suzman, 1995) to test the current hypotheses. These data were analyzed with multinomial logistic regression, and most of the hypotheses were supported by the results. The implications of this study are discussed at both theoretical and practical levels.

Projecting Behavioral Responses to the Next Generation of Retirement Policies

This paper examines retirement and related behavioral responses to policies that on average are actuarially neutral. Many conventional models predict that actuarially neutral policies will not affect retirement behavior. In contrast, our model allows those with high time preference rates to find that the promise of an actuarially fair increase in future rewards does not balance the loss from foregone current benefits. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we find that from age 62 through full retirement age, the earnings test reduces full-time work by married men by about four percentage points, or by about ten percent of married men at full-time work. Abolishing the requirements on many jobs that an individual work full-time or not at all, what we term a minimum hours constraint on employment, would induce more than twice as many people to enter partial retirement as would leave full-time work, so that total full-time equivalent (FTE) employment would increase, although by a modest amount. If all benefits from personal accounts could be taken as a lump sum, the fraction not retired at age 62 would fall by about 5 percentage points compared to a system where there is mandatory annuitization of benefits.

Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

Nótaí na nEagarthóirí:Editors' Notes James Silas Rogers We begin New Hibernia Review's twenty-third volume with notice of a change: this is the last issue under my editorship, owing to my full retirement. I know our readers will join me in welcoming our new editor, Dr. David M. Gardiner, who comes to us from an already accomplished career in Irish Studies, including (during his earlier tenure at Creighton University) his creative stewardship of An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts. I leave with confidence that the best years of this journal are ahead of it, under his energetic leadership. And I leave, too, with immense gratitude for the contributions of the scholars, poets, memoirists, and reviewers who have built this journal's reputation. Certainly, the members of our editorial boards have been inspiring in their commitment to excellence. I would be remiss if I did not also thank you, the readers and subscribers, who give purpose and creditibility to the publication. Finally, I must thank the University of St. Thomas for its longstanding and continued support of the journal and the Center for Irish Studies. In exploring and fostering the Irish note in the Humanities, the university honors us all. I have been fortunate indeed to serve in that project. The stereotypical Irish person is boisterous, extroverted, and talks entirely too much: but such glib stereotypes wear thin in a hurry, and are certainly not what Dr. Karen Babine seeks on her Irish travels. In our opening memoir, Babine pauses in several sacred sites, from the ruins of Clonmacnoise to the still-active churches of Galway, and plumbs the depths of association that come to her in the moments of quiet these places afford. As in her acclaimed essay collections Water and What We Know (2015) and All the Wild Hungers (2019), Babine's reflections range widely and allusively. Karen Babine previously appeared in these pages as an essayist and as the author of a study of Tim Robinson. She is the founding editor of the on-line journal Assay: Nonfiction Studies. [End Page 5] Countless visitors from both home and abroad cherish the landscapes of Killarney National Park. Here, Dr. Julieann Ulin recounts the tale of how, little more than sixty years ago, this national treasure was in imminent peril of being sold off to American buyers who—after early assurances that the region would be unscathed—soon began making plans to privatize the place as an enclave for the super-rich. In the face of the brute reality that little could be done legally to stop the sale, the response in Ireland was widespread outrage and dismay. It was not until the middle of 1958 that a new group of wealthy Irish Americans, among them I. A. O'Shaughnessy, officially scrapped the development plans, and the property was sold to the state some years later—but it is well worth recalling that this happy ending came close to never happening. Ulin reveals the centrality of this episode to future thinking and legislation on parks and civic space in Ireland; for one thing, it led directly to the passage of the milestone 1963 Local Government (Planning and Development) Act. Moreover, the sale provides a previously unrecognized context for John B. Keane's 1965 play The Field. Juileann Ulin's many publications include Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature (2014). U2's music might arguably be called the most prominent Irish export in the world today. For the most part, though, their output has been only slightly tinged with signifiers of their Irishness. But in the 1988 album "Rattle and Hum and especially in 'Sunday Bloody Sunday" Dr. Kevin Farrell sees the band make a clear turn toward an Irish post-nationalist stance—a gesture complicated by U2's selective relationship with the traditions of African American music. Kevin Farrell has published on Irish R&B in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Dr. M. L. Brillman also homes in on the political and cultural overlays of U2's music-making, particularly in the 1980s, a decade in which their forays into "conscience rock" were heavily inflected by the United States: "U2 did...

The retirement behaviour of the self-employed in Britain

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.

Why family business owners should consider alternatives to full retirement

Why family business owners should consider alternatives to full retirement

Aching to retire? The rise in the full retirement age and its impact on the social security disability rolls

The Social Security Amendments of 1983 reduced the generosity of Social Security retired worker benefits in the U.S. by increasing the program's full retirement age from 65 to 67 and increasing the penalty for claiming benefits at the early retirement age of 62. These changes were phased in gradually, so that individuals born in or before 1937 were unaffected and those born in 1960 or later were fully affected. No corresponding changes were made to the program's disabled worker benefits, and thus the relative generosity of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits increased. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the Amendments on SSDI enrollment by exploiting variation across birth cohorts in the policy-induced reduction in the present value of retired worker benefits. Our findings indicate that the Amendments significantly increased SSDI enrollment since 1983, with an additional 0.6% of men and 0.9% of women between the ages of 45 and 64 receiving SSDI benefits in 2005 as a result of the changes. Our results further indicate that these effects will continue to increase during the next two decades, as those fully exposed to the reduction in retirement benefit generosity reach their fifties and early sixties.

Using Stated Preferences Data to Analyze Preferences for Full and Partial Retirement

Using Stated Preferences Data to Analyze Preferences for Full and Partial Retirement

IN MEMORIAM: SAM CLARK

Early in the morning Thursday October 26, 2006 Samuel K. Clark passed away at the age of 81. “Professor Emeritus Samuel K. Clark, Ph.D., P.E., SAE Fellow” said that anyone who was impressed by such things deserved what they got, which is why he was known to most people as “Sam.”Sam was one of the preeminent tire researchers in the last half of the twentieth century and remained active after retirement working on specialized instrumentation in support of tire science. He will be remembered not only for his research work, but also for his positive influence on his students, consulting clients, and all who worked with him. A generation of tire research and development engineers had Clark's “Mechanics of Pneumatic Tires” as the foundation of their professional libraries. To tire engineers and tire scientists, they are simply known as Clark's Book.Born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on November 3, 1924 Sam was the son of the late Floyd Clark and Esther Kelly Clark. He grew up in Ypsilanti, and graduated from Roosevelt High School, the teaching school of the former Michigan Normal College. He entered the U.S. Navy V-12 Program in 1942 and was commissioned as a Lieutenant, but did not see active service. Following World War II, he was employed as an engineer with the Douglas Aircraft Company of California and the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, MI.Professor Clark earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from the University of Michigan in 1946, 1948, and 1951, respectively. He married Mary Battelle, an Ypsilanti native, in 1952. In 1968 he and his wife Mary purchased land and designed and built a home in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, where they summered and visited frequently until 1998.In 1952, he joined the faculty of Chase Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. Then he returned to the University of Michigan, Department of Engineering Mechanics, in 1955 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1957 and professor in 1959. In addition to his research work, Professor Clark served as director of the undergraduate materials testing laboratory from 1957 to 1978, developed popular courses in composite materials and experimental stress analysis, and was the dynamics course leader. He remained on the faculty as professor of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics until his retirement from active faculty status on May 31, 1992. He continued consulting and research during a retirement sabbatical, then took full retirement from the University in 1994.Like many researchers he came to tires somewhat indirectly. When he arrived at the University of Michigan, he was interested in walking machines. An Akron consortium of tire companies came to the University of Michigan looking for a consultant on tires. The Engineering Mechanics Department suggested they speak to their new faculty member who was interested in transportation mechanics.Professor Clark made seminal research contributions in studies related to aircraft and automotive tires. His research has been sponsored by major rubber, automobile, and aircraft companies as well as by the U.S. Air Force, NASA, NSF, and the Department of Transportation and he authored over 100 journal articles and research reports. Professor Clark was asked to write a book on tire mechanics. In 1971 the U.S. Bureau of Standards published the first edition of “Mechanics of Pneumatic Tires,” which tire engineers relied on for many years for detailed information about the principles of tire design and use. In 1981 a substantially revised second edition was published. With the books long out of print, he served as chair of an Editorial Board composed of leading executives of the tire industry, which provided guidance during the monograph's third revision.He was a founding member of The Tire Society, and Professor Clark was asked to present the plenary lecture at the first meeting of The Tire Society in 1982, and was an Associate Editor of The Journal of Tire Science and Technology until his death. He was also a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, The Society for Experimental Stress Analysis, the National Materials Advisory Board Committee on Surface Effect Vehicles, and The Society of Automotive Engineers. In honor of his many achievements, he was named a fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1985.Building on his research experience in tire engineering, he started the Precision Measurement Company in 1966, which he continued to actively run with his son Sam until his death. Survivors include his wife, Mary B. Clark, sons Samuel C. of Ann Arbor, Andrew B. of Boston, MA, and Frederic A. Clark of Baraboo, WI. He was preceded in death by two of his children, Elizabeth B. and David H. Clark.Sam Clark was a great person, mentor, and teacher who will be dearly missed by his family, his colleagues, his students, and his friends.

Active aging and pension reform: The gender implications in France

In the first section of this article, the authors Christel Gilles and Antoine Parent, argue that in France, public policy and the pension system provide financial incentives favoring early retirement. The implementation of “bridge jobs” to facilitate the transition from full employment to full retirement, could, in theory, lessen the long-term decline in employment rates of men and women. Gilles and Parent, in the second section, question the idea that rising labor force participation rates among women are adequate to narrow pension inequalities between men and women. Regarding this point, we also note that since women's careers are generally shorter than men's and their labor income remains, on average, lower, an increase, in female labor force participation would lead, in an occupational-based system, to a substitution effect between direct and indirect entitlements. The impact of this effect on pension gender inequalities remains uncertain. In the third section, the authors examine, from a gender perspective, other pension reform options that may, in theory, provide greater gender equality, but that are, in practice, far from the implementation phase.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Keywords: aging; elders; seniors; age discrimination; ageism So swiftly passes a year at my age. It seems only yesterday was writing about I'm 64, and now, have reached what is generally considered to be the traditional age of full retirement: 65, halfway through my seventh decade-one of those rites-of-passage birthdays, like 13 (if you are Jewish), 21 (legal adulthood), and (the half-century mark), that rings with portent. No denying it: really am old now, although have friends past 80 who will giggle at that statement. am always irritated when people say, I don't feel (or 70 or 75 and so forth). Of course they do. Since not one of us knows what it feels like to be older than we are, whatever we feel is what that age feels like. Equally irritating are recent boomer slogans such as 50 is the new 30. Anyone who can't tell the difference is a case of arrested development and a contributor to our youthcrazed, ageist culture. The downsides of becoming 65 have, so far, been minimal. don't have the stamina and strength once had and need to spread out chores and errands over longer periods of time. But don't find that a burden. like the extra walks necessary to finish shopping, and if it's harder to stay awake into the wee hours, I've known since my 20s that nothing noteworthy happens at the party past midnight. Famous and celebrated contemporaries who have defined the era in which have lived die more frequently now: just last year, Richard Pryor, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, Prince Rainier of Monaco, Hunter Thompson, Arthur Miller, Johnny Carson, and Betty Friedan. Youngsters who know these people only historically probably can't grasp the force with which each one, at the peak, etched his or her sensibility on the public consciousness of the second half of the 20th century. But that was then, and this is now. In recent years, the rightness of death makes more sense to me. Those scientists who spend millions researching life extension, predicting 200-year life spans one day, are selfish and wrong. Elders must make way for younger people who are unencumbered by attachments to the past and are a better match to new times, new eras, and new issues. The upsides of getting older far outweigh the negatives. am more patient with myself and others. Experience has alleviated the fears that plagued my 20s, 30s, and even 40s. Having learned that, aside from putting a gun to one's head, few decisions are irrevocable, they come more easily now and with less anguish. Well, maybe not all decisions. This turned out to be a significant year. Settling in New York City in 1969 was a childhood dream, and in a sense, all 28 years before were prelude. have been extraordinarily happy living here, so much so that when bought this cozy, little apartment 23 years ago on one of the prettiest streets in Greenwich Village, it felt so permanent that told friends would be taken out feetfirst-it was my last move. …

Work-Family Conflict and Retirement Preferences

This study investigates relationships between retirement preferences and perceived levels of work-family conflict. Using the large sample of 52-54-year-old respondents to the 1992 Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we estimated multinomial logistic regression models of preferences for partial and full retirement within the next 10 years. We examined the association between retirement preferences and perceived work-family conflict, evaluated the extent to which work-family conflict was a mediating mechanism between stressful work and family circumstances and preferences to retire, and explored potential gender differences in the association between work-family conflict and preferring retirement. Work-family conflict was positively related to preferences for both full and partial retirement. Yet work-family conflict did not appear to mediate relationships between stressful work and family environments and retirement preferences, nor did significant gender differences emerge in this association. Our analyses provide the first direct evidence of the role played by work-family conflict in the early stages of the retirement process, although we were not able to identify the sources of conflict underlying this relationship. Identifying the sources of this conflict and the psychological mechanisms linking work-family conflict to retirement preferences is an important task for future researchers.

The Selection of Partial or Full Retirement by Older Workers

The study investigated whether older workers chose partial or full retirement instead of full-time work. Partial or full retirement status was modeled as a combination of self-reported retirement status and change in number of hours worked. The results of multinomial logistic regression using data from the first and fifth waves of the Health and Retirement Study collected in 1992 and 2000 showed that age and gender had similar effects on the likelihood of partial and full retirement. Full retirement was also influenced by investment assets, pensions, employee health insurance, and poor health. The likelihood of partial retirement was also influenced by self-employment, chronic health conditions, and education. Workers who seek partial retirement need working conditions that allow them to make this choice.

Race, Ethnicity, and Social Security Retirement Age in the us

This study uses the AHEAD survey to examine the effects of increasing the Social Security retirement age in the United States by modeling the labor force participation decisions of men and women over the age of 65. Separate probit analyses by gender with interaction terms indicate that race/ethnicity is only marginally important in these decisions after controlling for key factors such as health, physical and mental disabilities, education, and nonlabor income. However, detailed examination reveals highly significant differences by race and ethnicity in all of these critical factors, as well as in the distribution of previous occupations. Although elderly blacks and Hispanics have greater financial need than whites, they have significantly less ability to continue working for pay. Thus, seemingly race- and ethnicity-neutral policies such as increasing the full Social Security retirement age may have disproportionate negative effects on elderly members of minority groups in the US.

Phasing into Retirement

To help workers navigate the transition from work to retirement more effectively, employers have been launching phased retirement programs, which allow older employees to work part-time and receive full retirement benefits. This paper examines the experience of the phased retirement system for tenured faculty in the University of North Carolina system over the years 1996–98. After phased retirement was introduced, there was a sizable increase in the overall separation rate in the system. The key finding from an empirical analysis of the retirement decision as a function of pension incentives, employee performance, demographics, and campus characteristics is that the odds of entering phased retirement were strongly and inversely related to employee performance, as measured by recent pay increases.

Retirement age: Economic outcome or social choice? Pension flexibility and retirement choice

This paper considers the conditions which have to be met if an individual is to be able to retire at a date of his own choosing. These conditions arguably are ‘partial pension’ flexibility to supplement earnings from part-time employment, full retirement income adequacy, elimination of age discrimination in employment and a state of health able to sustain an active and productive lifestyle. The paper attempts to identify those developments in social policy (and, by way of an Appendix, in health risk management) during the last 20 years which have the most practical bearing on the realisation of these necessary conditions for individual retirement choice. The paper concludes with a personal view on what may still need to be accomplished through social policy innovation to create these conditions, and how a new retirement paradigm, offering opportunities for work, education and leisure in old age could be of benefit to both the individual and the community. This paper follows ‘Retirement Age: Economic outcome or social choice? Pension policies and retirement practices’ in Pensions, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 148–162, which considers how the notion of retirement age, embodied in pension systems, evolved and how it is related to our concept of ‘old age’.

The Social Security Retirement Earnings Test, Retirement and Benefit Claiming

This paper introduces the age at which Social Security benefits are claimed as an additional outcome in a structural model of retirement and wealth. The model is then used to simulate the effects of abolishing the remainder of the Social Security earnings test, between age 62 and the full retirement age. Estimates are based on data for married men from the first six waves of the Health and Retirement Study. From age 62 through the full retirement age, the earnings test reduces the share of married men who work full time by about four percentage points, which entails a reduction of about ten percent in the number of married men of that age at full time work. In terms of the cash flow of the system, abolishing the earnings test would have an adverse effect, at least initially. If the earnings test were abolished between the early and full retirement ages, the share of married men claiming Social Security benefits would increase by about 10 percentage points, and the average benefit payments would increase by about $1,800 per recipient. The initial increase in benefit payments would eventually be reversed, over a time span of decades, because the annual benefit amounts would eventually be reduced by more than an actuarially fair amount due to the earlier collection of benefits. One can increase the employment of older persons either by abolishing the earnings test or by increasing the early entitlement age under Social Security. A major difference on the funding side is that abolishing the earning test results in an earlier flow of benefit payments from Social Security, worsening the cash-flow problems of the system, while increasing the early entitlement age delays the flow of benefit payments from the system, improving its liquidity.

Power Transition and the Making of Beijing's Policy towards Taiwan

Few policy domains can come close to Taiwan affairs in exemplifying the way Jiang's reigning authority has been self-extended beyond his official tenure. Fighting for his place in history, Jiang's desire to reset the cross-Strait scoreboard before his full retirement remains strong. Also, the structure of the newly elected SCP clearly reinforces Jiang's ability to cast a long shadow over Hu for some time to come. Hu is thus expected to adhere with great caution to Jiang's updated policy guidelines on Taiwan affairs, as laid out in the retiring general secretary's farewell Party work report to the CCP 16th Congress. Besides, Hu has few incentives not to because the Taiwan affairs portfolio carries excessive risk and a slow return, in addition to being one of the policy areas that he is least prepared for. However, the symbolic significance of the Taiwan issue also means that the generational turnover from Jiang to Hu cannot be considered complete until Hu takes full command over Beijing's policy towards Taiwan.

An empirical study of older workers’ attitudes towards the retirement experience

This study examined the attitudes of older workers towards work and retirement, retirement planning and their willingness to continue working after retirement and to undergo retraining. Data were collected via questionnaire surveys. Respondents consisted of 204 individuals aged 40 and above who attended courses at a local institute of labor studies. Findings suggested that work occupied a salient part of the respondents’ lives. In general, respondents also held rather ambivalent attitudes with regard to the prospect of retirement, i.e. while they did not view retirement negatively, they were nevertheless anxious about certain aspects of retirement. Results also suggested that majority of respondents preferred to remain employed in some ways even after they have officially retired from the workforce, i.e. partial rather than full retirement was preferred. Implications of findings for organizations and policy makers were discussed.

Issues for Implementing Phased Retirement in Defined Benefit Plans

U.S. society is aging. The nature of work has changed from work that requires physical strength to work based on knowledge. As a result, workers are beginning to phase into retirement rather than going directly from full-time work to full retirement. From a retirement income perspective, many final-average-pay defined benefit plans have features that make phased retirement difficult at best and detrimental at worst. U.S. pension law and regulations present barriers to phased retirement if the phased retiree wants to receive a portion of available pension benefits during phased retirement. This paper examines private sector options to encourage phased retirement and to eliminate the disincentives that currently affect defined benefit plans. It offers alternative calculations of final average pay that do not penalize the part-time worker. It also demonstrates that the plan’s early retirement reduction and late retirement increase can be set to maintain actuarial equity throughout phased retirement. The paper presents benefit calculations with equal actuarial values for various payout patterns. The paper discusses the coordination between phased retirement and subsidized early retirement. Finally, the paper notes some of the changes in ERISA that will be needed to facilitate phased retirement in defined benefit plans, especially for participants who want to receive pension distributions while working part time.