New Paths to Retirement

Abstract

Labor force participation rates among older Americans are no longer declining. Many more older men and women are working today than pre-1985 trends would have predicted. In this paper, we analyze retirement patterns in the 1990s, using the first three waves of the new Health and Retirement Study. We find that many Americans withdraw from the labor market gradually, often utilizing bridge jobs between full-time career employment and complete labor force withdrawal. These patterns of labor force withdrawal will become more important to analysts and policy-makers in the future as the baby-boom generation approaches their retirement years. 3 Until recently, one of the most important and intriguing phenomena in American labor markets was the post-war early retirement trend-- the fact that older men were leaving the labor force earlier and earlier. In 1950, 72 percent of all 65-year old men were in the labor force, employed or actively looking for work. As seen in table 1, this percentage fell steadily and precipitously over the next three-and-a-half decades, reaching about 30 percent by 1985-- a decline of well more than a half. Even larger percentage declines were observed for men older---Table 1 about here--than

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