A Forced Choice: Early Retirement and Re-employment among Old-aged Korean Workers

Contractual mandatory retirement isdely practiced in Korean firms and wage workers have to leave their main life-time job in their early 50s on average. While her population and workforce are rapidly ageing, this involuntary early retirement system poses a serious challenge to individuals' old-age income security and sustainlable growth. In this paper, we analyze the labor market process of retirement and reemployment in an event-historic perspective. We use the KLIPS(Korea Labor and Income Panel Study) - a rich panel data set that contains individuals work history and their demographic characteristics. We estimate the effects of the individual, household, and job-level determinants on the rate and path of later- work life transition and discuss implications for labor market and social policy for an ageing society