ABSTRACT
In the past decades there have been enormous changes in the age at which older men (and women) leave the labor market. All Western societies have seen a sharp decrease in the labor market participation of older adults and the Netherlands has been no exception (Kohli et al. 1991). Older men's labor market behavior has often been analyzed before in the Netherlands. Several studies focused on the use of different exit paths, including unemployment (Henkens, Sprengers and Tazelaar 1996; Sprengers 1992; Kapteyn and De Vos 1998), disability (Aarts and De Jong 1990), and early retirement (De Vroom and Blomsma 1991; Henkens 1998). Other studies have compared the use of the main exit paths, and focused on how they were inter-related (Fouarge, Schils and Huynen 2004; Heyma 2001). Though most such studies used a panel design, their data cover only a limited time period. Few studies have examined long-term trends in the labor force participation of older workers, though exceptions exist in several retrospective analyses of the careers of older workers in cohorts born between 1903 and 1937 that are based on the NESTOR-LSN survey from 1992 (Liefbroer and Henkens 1999; Van Solinge and Fokkema 2000). Few studies, however, cover the whole “golden age of early retirement,” which began at the end of the 1970s and supposedly ended in the 1990s.
