Preretirement resources and postretirement life satisfaction change trajectory: Examining the mediating role of retiree experience during retirement transition phase.

Successfully adjusting to retirement represents a major challenge for many older workers. Following the temporal unfolding of retirement process (i.e., preretirement, transition, and postretirement phases), the present study draws on the resource-based dynamic model of retirement adjustment to investigate how a diverse set of preretirement personal resources (i.e., physical health, mental health, financial well-being, family support, proactive personality, and general cognitive ability) impact postretirement change trajectory of life satisfaction through the pathway of retirement transition experience (i.e., retirees' subjective experience in terms of how well they are adjusting during the transition phase of retirement immediately after the workforce exit). Using multiwave longitudinal data from 667 Chinese older workers transitioning into retirement collected with a prospective design over 2 years, we found positive effects of the levels of preretirement mental health, financial well-being, family support, proactive personality, and cognitive ability on retirement transition experience. We also found positive effects of the changes in physical health, financial well-being, and family support on retirement transition experience. Retirement transition experience, in turn, was associated with older workers' postretirement change trajectory of life satisfaction. Our findings highlight the importance of the transition phase of retirement, as well as the role of retirement transition experience during this critical phase in explaining the relationships between preretirement resources, in terms of both their levels and changes, and postretirement changes in well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Health among workers retiring after the state pension age: a longitudinal and comparative study.

BACKGROUND: In recent decades, many countries have observed increasing labor force participation beyond the state pension age (SPA). However, there is a lack of research on employment beyond SPA and how it relates to older workers' health. Moreover, there is a need to better understand how institutional factors affect the relationship between older workers' employment and health. In this study, we examine simultaneous employment and health trajectories over 11 years in 12 countries from Europe and the Americas, and study how these trajectories differ by welfare state regime and level of old-age pension redistribution. METHODS: We used a harmonized pooled-country dataset of 3699 older workers based on four representative panel surveys: the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), and the Chilean Social Protection Survey (EPS). We conducted multichannel sequence analysis to estimate the types of simultaneous employment-health trajectories, and multinomial regression analysis to examine the relationship between trajectory types and institutional factors. RESULTS: We found that late retirement was equally associated with poor and good health. There is also a higher prevalence of late retirement trajectories in combination with poor health in liberal welfare regimes and in countries with lower levels of old-age pension redistribution. CONCLUSION: Our study indicates that nonliberal welfare regimes and redistributive old-age pension policies may be better suited to protect vulnerable workers while providing those in good health with the opportunity to work beyond the SPA.

Subjective Nearness-To-Death and Retirement Anxiety Among Older Workers: A Three-Way Interaction With Work Group Identification.

Retirement anxiety represents a major challenge for older workers who hold negative expectations and concerns regarding the consequences of their future retirement. Although prior studies suggest that retirement is an age-related transition that may serve as a reminder that life is nearing its end, little is known about how subjective nearness-to-death is related to retirement anxiety, and the role of work group identification as a boundary condition. The current study draws on terror management and social identity theories to hypothesize and investigate these relationships. A three-way interaction model was tested on a sample of 327 Israeli older workers. We found a positive association between subjective nearness-to-death and retirement anxiety. Further, we demonstrated that the positive relationship between subjective nearness-to-death and retirement anxiety was more prominent for older workers whose work group self-definition and self-investment were both high or were both low. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Is student loan debt good or bad for full-time employment upon graduation from college?

Student loan debt represents an important phenomenon in the United States, as around 61% of bachelor's degree recipients graduate with a debt of over $28,100. Although studies emphasize that holding student loan debt delays the transition to adulthood in terms of marriage and home ownership, little is known about its impact on employment and this limited research offers, at best, equivocal evidence. The current study draws from Conservation of Resources theory to argue that student loan debt acts as a major financial stressor for new labor market entrants during job search. Using archival data from 1,248 graduating seniors from 4 geographically diverse universities in the United States collected in the context of a prospective study design, we found evidence for 2 countervailing mechanisms through which student loan debt may influence full-time employment upon graduation. On the one hand, college students who had student loan debt were more likely to experience financial strain, and subsequently more job search strain, which was negatively related to college seniors' odds of securing full-time employment upon graduation. On the other hand, this financial strain was also positively related to students' work hours while in the last semester of college, which was positively related to their odds of securing full-time employment upon graduation. Further mediation tests revealed that only the 3-stage indirect effect through job search strain (i.e., student loan debt → financial strain → job search strain → full-time employment) was statistically significant. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).