@article {9437, title = {Cognitive Ability, Personality, and Pathways to Retirement: An Exploratory Study}, journal = {Work, Aging and Retirement}, volume = {4}, year = {2018}, pages = {52-66}, abstract = {This article describes an exploratory study that investigates the extent to which two sets of psychological factors, fluid cognitive ability and personality traits, predict late-in-life work and retirement outcomes. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, we first provide a detailed characterization of within-subject work-to-retirement pathways, spanning 14 years of data for each individual, and identify the most frequent pathway classes. We found that only 37\% of workers followed the "standard" pattern of retiring completely from a full-time job. We then examined how cognitive ability and personality traits predict these work-to-retirement pathways. We found that individuals with better cognitive ability work longer, both in full- and in part-time jobs, and extraversion is a strong predictor of working longer, mainly in part-time jobs. These results are robust to the inclusion of many covariates, including demographics, health, socioeconomic status, and labor market variables. Although the observed patterns match individuals{\textquoteright} retirement expectations to some extent, there also seems to be evidence of some surprise. Practical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.}, keywords = {Bridge employment, Cognition \& Reasoning, Personality, Retirement Planning and Satisfaction}, issn = {2054-4642}, doi = {10.1093/workar/wax030}, url = {http://academic.oup.com/workar/article/4/1/52/4762671http://academic.oup.com/workar/article-pdf/4/1/52/23296931/wax030.pdf}, author = {P{\'e}ter Hudomiet and Andrew M Parker and Susann Rohwedder}, editor = {Gwenith G Fisher} }