Kevin E. Cahill presented a paper co-authored with Michael D. Giandrea (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) and Joseph F. Quinn (Boston College) at the Southern Economic Association meetings in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on November 23rd. The paper explored whether unretirements have been increasing in recent years, most notably in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the slow but persistent economic recovery that followed. Cahill, Giandrea, and Quinn used data on four cohorts of older career workers from the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study (HRS) from 1992 through 2016 and examined the prevalence of reentry over time among each one. They found that reentry continues to play an important role in the retirement process of older Americans, with rates more or less consistent across cohorts. Most notably, they did not find evidence of a shift in the prevalence of unretirements in recent years.
