Working Pensioners in Europe

Over the past decades, combining pension benefits with work income has been made more accessible for pensioners in many European countries. The literature on working pensioners choosing a flexible transition into retirement is to date relatively sparse. This project adds to the few cross-country studies and explicitly investigates the role of pension systems in facilitating or hampering flexible retirement. By using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), this project studies the within-country determinants of working pensioners and investigate cross-country variation. The project finds that demographic variables as well as health variables, economic variables and the pension system are important determinants why individuals choose to combine pension income with work income at the end of their working career. Counterfactual simulations reveal that variation in working pensioner proportions between countries can be explained by economic differences and differences in pension systems.