Retirement Age and Later-Life Employment by Gender: The Survival Trees and Ensemble Survival Models Approaches

Wioletta Grzenda , SGH Warsaw School of Economics

In view of the aging population of Europe, many reforms aiming to increase the labour market participation of older people are introduced. Frequently, these reforms include increasing the statutory retirement age. The aim of our research is to reveal the impact of the retirement age on employment of the elderly, in relation to their individual characteristics and work-related factors. We focus on Poland as an example of a country with particularly low employment and labour force participation rates of the elderly. Analysing over time the employment of people around retirement age we received that the probability of stopping work changes in different ways for women and men but does not depend on reaching retirement age. Thus, our results indicate that to increase the labour market participation of the elderly, more attention should be paid to work-related factors and gender differences than to the retirement age. We received, inter alia, that in the case of women, the greatest probability of employment termination was due to work that was not consistent with education level and was performed in a public institution. However, in the case of men, having a fixed-term contract, living in a large city, and working in shifts were the key factors influencing finishing employment around retirement age. In the study, we used survival trees. Moreover, we proposed a novel method based on the ensemble of survival models, which makes it possible to calculate the probability of the employment duration of workers depending on their individual characteristics, including time-dependent characteristics.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe