Early retired or automatized? Evidence from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe

Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Opportunities and Challenges in Management, Economics and Accounting

Year: 2021

DOI:

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Early retired or automatized? Evidence from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe

Pablo Casas, Concepción Román

 

ABSTRACT: 

This paper measures the implications of the actual destructive and transformative technological process in the labor market for the early retirement decisions in 26 European countries. In order to perform the analysis, we use the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, the computerization probability (Frey and Osborne, 2017) and a technological classification of occupations in 4 occupational terrains (Fossen and Sorgner, 2019) to find that the current technological change is playing a significant role in the early retirement decisions, although it affect heterogeneously to certain groups in the sample (workers with higher education, self-employed workers and workers in occupations with low affectation by the technological change). This fact leads to a contradiction between governments trying to delay retirement ages and labor markets trying to expel workers earlier. Therefore, we conclude that, in order to elaborate policies on ageing and retirement, the effect of new technologies in older worker’s decisions must be taken into account. We propose that the delay in statutory retirement ages should be accompanied by training programs and/or policies promoting self-employment for workers at risk of ending their working lives prematurely. Furthermore, the programs aimed to relocate middle-age workers displaced from their origin occupations should focus the finding of a destination occupation among those less impacted by new technologies (i.e., occupations in the human terrain).

keywords: Early retirement, Technological change, Automation.