What Causes Workers to Retire Before They Plan?

This paper explores the extent to which health, employment, family, or finances are associated with earlier-than-planned retirement using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The importance of any shock that drives early retirement depends both on its effect on those experiencing it and its prevalence in the population; therefore, the analysis proceeds in two steps. First, a probit regression is used to determine the strength of the relationship between the shocks and earlier-than-planned retirement, controlling for individual characteristics. Second, to incorporate the prevalence of the shock, counterfactual experiments are run to determine how much early retirement would be reduced in the population if these shocks did not occur