Minimum Hours Constraints, Job Requirements and Retirement

A structural retirement model estimated with data from the Health and Retirement Study is used to simulate the effects of policies firms might adopt to improve employment conditions for older workers and thereby encourage delayed retirement. Firm policies that effectively abolished minimum hours constraints would strongly increase the number partially retired, while reducing full time work and full retirement, resulting in only a small net increase in full time equivalent employment. Reducing physical and mental requirements of jobs would have much weaker effects on retirement than was suggested by work with the 1970s Retirement History Study. Reducing informal pressures to retire, increasing employer accommodations to health problems, and reducing the prevalence of layoffs and retirement windows would have only small effects on retirement outcomes.