The Skill-Specific Automatability of Aging Workers and Retirement Decisions
By Zeewan Lee
Much of the discourse on the impact of automation on labor supply tends to assess the labor force as a whole, thereby disregarding the marginal effect on aging workers. In lights of the growing technological changes, we assess the linkage between the automatability of workers and retirement timing. Based on the theoretical model of task-based technological changes and drawing data from the Health and Retirement Study and O*NET, we create an Automatability Index based on workers’ primary skills. Using the Index as our main explanatory variable, we find that the automatability accelerates retirement and shortens the duration of individuals’ working lives, both in terms of the expected and the actual retirement timing. The financial mediators and the psychological mediators are not shown to modify the strength of the association between the degree of automatability and retirement.
Source: SSRN
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