Preference for early retirement, health and job satisfaction: a European comparison

This work uses the first wave of SHARE to analyze the impact of health and satisfaction at work on preferences concerning age at retirement in 10 European countries. Preferences concerning age at retirement are measured by the rate of people wishing to retire as soon as possible. We examine how health and work conditions contribute to explain differences in these preferences both at the individual level and between countries. At the individual level, the effects that are obtained are consistent with expectations, but they are of little help for explaining international differences. Fixing health and work conditions, we observe a north-south gradient of preferences for early retirement which remains close to the gross cross country differentials. All these results are robust to control by institutional features of pension systems (overall generosity of pension systems) and to control for the selection bias implied by the fact that preferences are only measured on people that are still in employment.