Retirement Transition Event-History Analysis

Retirement transition event-history analysis applies survival and hazard modeling to the timing of the move out of the labor force in later life, treating retirement as a datable event whose risk unfolds over time. Rather than asking only whether someone is retired, it models the rate at which still-working older people retire at each age or duration, and how that rate depends on health, pensions, career history, and other life-course factors. Mark Hayward and colleagues' 1998 study of older men's retirement exemplifies the approach, showing that occupational and career trajectories shape the timing of labor-force exit, with different career conditions mattering at different stages. The method handles the central problem that many people are still working when observed, through right-censoring, and it accommodates covariates that change over time such as deteriorating health or pension eligibility. It can be implemented as a continuous-time proportional-hazards model or as a discrete-time model on person-period data. The result is a life-course account of why people retire when they do, expressed as transition rates and hazard ratios.