IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ecb/ecbbox/202200062.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

COVID-19 and retirement decisions of older workers in the euro area

Author

Listed:
  • Botelho, Vasco
  • Weißler, Marco

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a temporary decrease in the labour market activity of older workers in the euro area. Our analysis finds that a part of the decrease was driven by a pandemic-induced shift in the retirement decisions of older workers, affecting around 175,000 people. This represents 0.5% of the labour force aged 55-74 retiring earlier than planned due to the pandemic. The heightened economic uncertainty and health risks stemming from the pandemic persuaded some older workers either to bide their time before returning to work or to retire early. Early retirement was most pronounced for workers in poorer health, stressing the growing importance of health risks for labour market developments. JEL Classification: E24, J14, J26

Suggested Citation

  • Botelho, Vasco & Weißler, Marco, 2022. "COVID-19 and retirement decisions of older workers in the euro area," Economic Bulletin Boxes, European Central Bank, vol. 6.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecb:ecbbox:2022:0006:2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ecb.europa.eu//press/economic-bulletin/focus/2022/html/ecb.ebbox202206_02~67d6677c0e.en.html
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. McGinnity, Frances & Russell, Helen & Alamir, Anousheh, 2024. "The equality impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Irish labour market," Research Series, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), number JR6.
    2. Mukovhe Takalani & Jean-Francois Mercier & Blessings Nkuna & Kagiso Mphahlele, 2024. "Are shifts in AE labour markets structural," Occasional Bulletin of Economic Notes 11055, South African Reserve Bank.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    COVID-19; Labour force; older workers; retirement;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • J14 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-Labor Market Discrimination
    • J26 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Retirement; Retirement Policies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecb:ecbbox:2022:0006:2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Official Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/emieude.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.