Between 2000 and 2050, the share of the population aged 60 and over is projected to increase in every country in the world; the same is true for the 80+ population in all but one country (Mali). Worldwide, the largest absolute increases are yet to come. Although labor force participation rates are projected to decline from 2000 to 2040 in most countries, due mainly to changes in their age distr...

The education gap between men and women has closed, or has even reversed in many countries. Have countries also made progress in closing other gaps facing women? Using micro-level Census data for close to 40 countries, we examine several dimensions of gender disparity: we compare men and women’s labor force participation (the labor force participation gap), married and single women’s labor forc...

As part of the search for ways to increase labor force participation rates among older workers in the United States, it makes sense to take a close look at evidence from Japan, one of the few industrial countries with a substantially higher labor force participation rate among older workers, particularly men, than the United States. Based mainly on prior studies and original interview data, we ...

Unlike in the United States where fertility is found to be negatively correlated with female labor force participation, China has witnessed a decrease in both fertility and female labor force participation since the 1980s. Does fertility play a different role in female labor force participation in China than in the U.S.? To answer this question, this paper exploits plausibly exogenous variation...

The analysis in this paper finds that the dramatic decline in labor force participation during the Great Recession is more than explained by deteriorating labor market conditions (cyclical factors).Behavior adjusted over this time period to boost labor force participation so that it was higher in 2012 than would have been predicted by the model. Depending on the strength of the labor market goi...

Who is out of the labor force early: the unhealthy or the healthy; the @.urwially fortunate or the u* fortunate? To answer these and other questions about retzrement in the United states, personal interviezc-a toere conducted in 1969 with &.lSS men representing the noninstitutionalized populattin aged 5S-6.9 The interviews revealed that 17 percent of the men were out of the labor force at the t...