Self-employed persons work in a less constrained environment than do most wage-and-salary employees. Generally they are not subject to compulsory retirement nor are they affected by institutional rules concerning labor supply. Data from the 1969 and 1971 interviews of the Retirement History Study show that the labor supply and retirement patterns of the self-employed are distinct from those of ...

OBJECTIVES This study examines the pre-retirement labor force participation behavior of Black, White, and Hispanic men and women to determine how patterns of labor market exit differ among groups. METHODS We combine data from the first and second waves of the Health and Retirement Study and apply multinomial logit regression techniques to model labor force status in the first wave of the HRS ...

We discover and document errors in public-use microdata samples ("PUMS files") of the 2000 Census, the 2003-2006 American Community Survey, and the 2004-2009 Current Population Survey. For women and men age 65 and older, age- and sex-specific population estimates generated from the PUMS files differ by as much as 15 percent from counts in published data tables. Moreover, an analysis of labor-fo...

This study seeks to quantify determinants, and costs, of the labor—force participation of married women. We use demographic and earnings data from the Health and Retirement Study. The earnings data constitute an unusually long panel but have the defect of lacking corresponding reports on work hours. By using a highly structured model and concentrating on the participation margin, we nevertheles...

In Germany, informal home care is preferred to professional care services in the public discussion as well as in legal care regulations. However, they ascribe only minor importance to the opportunity costs care givers have to face. Therefore, this paper explores the infl uence home care has on the labor supply of carers who live together with their care recipient. I am using the German Socio-Ec...

Labor-force participation among Mexican males in their early retirement years (60 to 64 years of age) has decreased in recent decades, from 94.6 percent in 1960 to 65.2 percent in 2010. Similar trends are evident elsewhere in Latin America, and have occurred in the developed world. Such trends pose challenges to financial sustainability of social security systems as working-age populations decr...

This paper uncovers a counter-intuitive effect of international trade on female labor shares: whenever trade expands sectors intensive in female labor, female labor shares drop. When capital complements female labor more than male labor, the following mechanism operates: Expansions of sectors intensive in female labor come along with contractions of sectors intensive in male labor. Thus, male l...

A Traditional explanation for the fall in the labor force participation of older males in the era of industrialization is that it was in part produced by the decline in agriculture. A number of recent studies rejected this view based on the result that farmers were no less likely to retire than were nonfarmers. An examination of a longer period, however, shows that farmers were less likely to r...

According to the justification hypothesis, non-employed individuals may over-report their level of work limitation, leading to biased census/survey estimates of the prevalence of severe disabilities and the associated labor force participation rate. For researchers studying policies which impact the disabled or elderly (e.g., Supplemental Security Income, Disability Insurance, and Early Retirem...

The problems of agriculture and poverty cannot be addressed without reducing the number of workers and their families dependent on land, thereby raising productivity. There are substantial rural-urban and male-female differences in rates of labor force participation, employment, and unemployment, as well as informality of employment that exist within and across South Asian countries. Also, most...