Retirement, Disability, and Employment

As populations in many countries age rapidly, understanding how and why older workers exit, reduce, or extend their participation in paid employment has become a pressing concern for policymakers and researchers alike. Demographers and social scientists examine how retirement timing is shaped by health status, pension and Social Security program design, employer practices including age discrimination, and individual motivations—as well as how retirement itself feeds back to affect physical and cognitive health. A growing body of work focuses on "bridge employment," the increasingly common pattern of partial or phased withdrawal from the workforce rather than a clean break, challenging older models that treated retirement as a single event. Open questions include how to distinguish the genuine preferences of older workers from the structural constraints they face, and how rising retirement ages in public programs interact with the uneven health and job-market conditions across different socioeconomic groups.

Works

95,426

Total citations

588,965

Keywords

RetirementAging WorkforceHealth EffectsEmployment PatternsSocial Security ProgramsAge Discrimination