In this report, we present improved wealth measures for the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which aim to reduce the effect of observation error on wealth levels and changes in wealth. The new wealth measures take account of the asset verification section in the HRS and use cross-wave...

We study whether individuals with different personality traits systematically exhibit different retirement trajectories. We find weak direct associations between personality and employment transitions. On the other hand, personality does contribute indirectly to these transitions by moderating...

Besides compensation and financial incentives, several other work-related factors may affect individual retirement decisions. Specifically, job characteristics such as autonomy, skill variety, task significance and difficulty, stress and physical demands, peer pressure and relations with...

It is widely believed that health plays a major role in retirement decisions. The most important problem in including health in retirement models is the lack of availability of a good measure of health at the individual level in existing data sets. This problem is exacerbated when a model...

This paper studies to what extent job characteristics such as physical and cognitive demands, use of technologies, responsibility, difficulty, stress, peer pressure, and relations with co-workers are related to full or partial retirement. We study employment transitions and retirement...

As employer-provided pension plans have largely shifted from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension plans, responsibility for plan investments and the accompanying risks have also shifted from the provider to the employee. Employees have to decide how much to contribute to...

This paper studies to what extent job characteristics such as physical and cognitive demands, use of technologies, responsibility, difficulty, stress, and social interaction are related to full or partial retirement. We study employment transitions and retirement expectations of older workers by...

We document considerable heterogeneity in the fraction of older workers across occupations, and show that this is related to occupational characteristics. For example, occupations that have larger fractions of older workers tend to be less physically demanding and more cognitively demanding....