The papers in this volume examine a series of important questions that influence the transition from full time employment to complete retirement. Retirement is shown to be a process as individuals move from career jobs to bridge jobs to being out of the labor force. The articles examine the characteristics of bridge jobs and the employment conditions that older workers prefer. Analysis provided by the authors show the importance of saving throughout work life and how pension plans and retirement saving plans influence the timing of retirement.

Engaging in paid employment after claiming retirement benefits may be an important avenue for individuals to work longer as life expectancies rise. After separating from one's career employer, individuals may engage in paid work to stay active or to supplement their current level of retirement savings or both. Individuals who choose not to work after claiming may be expressing their preference to stay retired, perhaps because their retirement income is sufficient. However, the decision to work after claiming may be driven by the lack of retirement planning and insufficient savings, while the lack of post-claiming work may reflect the inability to find adequate employment opportunities. We use administrative records merged with panel data from several surveys of public employees in North Carolina to study the decision to engage in paid work after claiming retirement benefits. More than 60% of active workers plan to work after claiming benefits, while only around 42% of the same sample of individuals have engaged in post-claiming paid work in the first few years after leaving public sector employment. Despite this gap, stated work plans are strongly predictive of actual post-claiming work behavior. Our final analysis uses self-reported measures to gauge the financial well-being of our sample in the early years after leaving career employment.

Along with data about actual, desired, and anticipated job characteristics, this paper uses a novel data element, the subjective conditional probability of working at age 70, to estimate the causal effects of job characteristics on retirement in the United States. Having flexible work hours is the most consistent predictor of retirement preferences and expectations: if all current workers had flexible hours, the fraction working at age 70 would be 0.322, but it would be just 0.172 if none had this option. Job stress, physical, and cognitive job demands, the option to telecommute, and commuting times were additional predictors of retirement expectations.

Working consistently through one's early 60s is key to retirement security. However, workers without access to retirement plans and health insurance will likely struggle to achieve such security. This paper uses the Health and Retirement Study to identify nontraditional jobs – which lack these benefits – and applies sequence analysis to explore how workers aged 50–62 use them. The results suggest that most nontraditional jobs are used by workers consistently, and that fewer workers use these jobs briefly or as a bridge to retirement. Workers consistently in nontraditional jobs end up with less retirement income and are more likely to be depressed.

Over the past several decades, private sector workers in the USA with employed-sponsored pensions have experienced a dramatic shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution plans, while this trend has been less pronounced for public sector workers. In this paper, we use data from the Health and Retirement Study to explore changes in the retirement incentives and retirement behavior of public and private sector workers over the past quarter-century. We find that both groups have become less likely to report having a DB pension or any pension. Compared to their private sector counterparts, public sector workers have a higher level of retirement wealth and a larger financial gain from continued work at older ages, and these differences by sector are growing across cohorts. Both groups respond to financial incentives in making retirement decisions. However, growing differences by sector in the gain to continued work do not appear to have translated into diverging retirement behavior, as we observe similar trends in the two groups.

We have designed and implemented an experimental module in the 2014 Health and Retirement Study to measure older persons' willingness to defer claiming of Social Security benefits. Under the current system’ status quo where delaying claiming boosts eventual benefits, we show that 46% of the respondents would delay claiming and work longer. If respondents were instead offered an actuarially fair lump sum payment instead of higher lifelong benefits, about 56% indicate they would delay claiming. Without a work requirement, the average amount needed to induce delayed claiming is only $60,400, while when part-time work is stipulated, the amount is slightly higher, $66,700. This small difference implies a low utility value of leisure foregone, of under 20% of average household income.

The share of workers who are self-employed rises markedly with age. Given policy concerns about inadequate retirement savings, especially among those with lower education, and the resulting interest in encouraging employment at older ages, it is important to understand the role that self-employment arrangements play in facilitating work among seniors. New data from a survey module fielded on a Gallup telephone survey distinguish independent contractor work from other self-employment and provide information on informal and online platform work. The Gallup data show that, especially after accounting for individuals who are miscoded as employees, self-employment is even more prevalent at older ages than suggested by existing data. Work as an independent contractor is the most common type of self-employment. Roughly one-quarter of independent contractors aged 50 and older work for a former employer. At older ages, self-employment generally – and work as an independent contractor specifically – is more common among the highly educated, accounting for much of the difference in employment rates across education groups. We provide suggestive evidence that differences in opportunities for independent contractor work play an important role in the lower employment rates of less-educated older adults.