Physical functioning as a predictor of retirement: Has its importance changed over a thirty-year period in Sweden?

Many countries, including Sweden, are implementing policies aimed at delaying retirement and encouraging older workers to remain on the labour market for longer. During recent decades, there have been several major reforms to the pension and social security systems in Sweden. Moreover, the nature of occupations has shifted towards more non-manual and sedentary activities, older women are today almost as active in the labour market as men in Sweden, and physical functioning has improved over time. In this study, we investigate whether the importance of physical functioning as a predictor for retirement has changed over time, for women and men, respectively. We used four waves of nationally representative data from The Swedish Level of Living Survey from 1981, 1991, 2000, and 2010, together with income register data. We found that greater severity of musculoskeletal pain and mobility limitations increased the likelihood of retirement in all waves. Results from logistic regression models with average marginal effects and predictive margins showed that there is a trend towards physical functioning becoming less important for retirement towards the end of the study period, especially for women, when controlling for occupational-based social class, age, adverse physical working conditions, and job demands. People, especially women, reporting impaired physical functioning did not retire to the same extent as in previous decades. This indicates that people stayed longer in the labour market despite impaired physical functioning, which may have repercussions on well-being and quality of life. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10433-022-00725-y.

Part-time work and health in late careers: Evidence from a longitudinal and cross-national study.

In this exploratory study, we examine how older workers' part-time employment and health are associated in four countries promoting this type of employment in late careers but with a different welfare regime: the United States, Germany, Sweden, and Italy. Using data from two large representative panel surveys and conducting multichannel sequence analysis, we identified the most typical interlocked employment and health trajectories for each welfare regime and for three different age groups of women and men. We found that there is more heterogeneity in these trajectories in countries with a liberal welfare regime and among older age groups. Overall, women are more strongly represented in the part-time employment trajectories associated with lower health levels. In countries with a social-democratic or corporatist welfare regime, part-time employment in late careers tends to be associated with good health. Our findings suggest that the combination of a statutory right to work part-time in late careers with a more generous welfare regimes, may simultaneously maintain workers' health and motivate them to remain active in the labor force.

How to Measure Retirement Age? A Comparison of Survey and Register Data.

Due to an increasing heterogeneity in retirement transitions, the measurement of retirement age constitutes a major challenge for researchers and policymakers. In order to better understand the concept of retirement age, we compare a series of measures for retirement age assessed on the basis of survey and register data. We use data from Sweden, where flexible retirement schemes are implemented and register data are available. We link survey data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey with register data from the Swedish Longitudinal Integration Database for Health Insurance and Labour Market Studies. We create four measures of retirement age based on these datasets, applying approaches that have been used in previous literature. We analyse the means and distributions of these measures and evaluate the correlations between them. Finally, we regress common predictors of retirement age such as gender or education on the four measures of retirement age to examine potential differences in size, direction and statistical significance of the associations. We find that the survey measure of retirement age resembles the following two ways of defining retirement age in the register data: first, the age at which people receive more than half their income from old-age or disability pension and, second, the age at which they were not gainfully employed for at least 2 years. This insight gives us a better understanding of when in the retirement transition process, individuals identify with retirement. Moreover, it provides decision support for researchers working with register data to determine which measure to use.