Early Adversity and Late Life Employment History—A Sequence Analysis Based on SHARE

Numerous studies have linked poor socioeconomic circumstances during working life with early retirement. Few studies, however, have summarized entire patterns of employment histories and tested their links to social position at earlier stages of the life course. Therefore, this article summarizes types of late life employment histories and tests their associations with adversity both during childhood and early adulthood. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with retrospective life history data on 5,857 older men and women across 14 countries. Employment histories are studied with annual information on the employment situation between ages 50 and 70. To summarize employment histories we apply sequence analysis and group histories into 8 clusters with similar histories. Most of these clusters are dominated by full-time employees, with retirement before, at or after age 60. Additionally, we find clusters that are dominated by self-employment and comparatively late retirement. The remaining clusters are marked by part-time work, continuous domestic work, or discontinuous histories that include unemployment before retirement. Results of multinomial regressions (accounting for country affiliation and adjusted for potential confounders) show that early adversity is linked to full-time employment ending in retirement at age 60 or earlier and to discontinuous histories (in the case of women), but not to histories of self-employment. In sum, we find that histories of employees with early retirement and discontinuous histories are part of larger trajectories of disadvantage throughout the life course, supporting the idea of cumulative disadvantage in life course research. Demographic ageing provides major challenges to European countries and their pension schemes. It raises, in particular, the question of how the proportion of older people on the labor market can be increased. Research therefore needs to improve knowledge on employment patterns at older ages and to investigate their determinants. With regard to this, studies show that contextual factors and political regulations influence the age by which people retire (e.g., tax incentives and retirement legislations; Börsch-Supan, Brugiavini, & Croda, 2009; Gruber & Wise, 1999). Besides, a wide range of individual characteristics have been related to retirement timing (Damman, Henkens, & Kalmijn, 2011; Fisher, Chaffee, & Sonnega, 2016; Wang & Shultz, 2010). The latter studies point to at least three types of determinants: employment and working conditions, poor health, and childhood adversity. In the case of employment and working conditions, studies from different countries show that people who work in disadvantaged occupational positions, and under adverse physical or psychosocial working conditions, are more likely to retire early (Carr et al., 2016; Hintsa et al., 2015; Lund & Villadsen, 2005; Madero-Cabib, Gauthier, & Le Goff, 2015; Radl, 2013; Visser et al., 2016), to leave the labor market due to disability (Falkstedt et al., 2014; Juvani et al., 2014; Lahelma et al., 2012), and to self-report retirement intentions (Carr et al., 2016; Elovainio et al., 2005; Wahrendorf, Dragano, & Siegrist, 2013). Second, with regard to health as another determinant of late life employment, studies across different countries have linked various measures of health to employment patterns (for a review see e.g.,: van Rijn et al., 2014), including self-perceived health (Mein, 2000), poor mental health (Virtanen et al., 2014), health functioning (McPhedran, 2012; Rice et al., 2011) and chronic disease (Majeed, Forder, & Byles, 2014; Mein, 2000; van den Berg et al., 2010). A small number of studies also show that previous stages of the life course, and especially socioeconomic disadvantage during childhood, are a third determinant of late life employment histories. For example, adversity during childhood was linked to premature retirement (Bonsdorff et al., 2015; Harkonmäki et al., 2007; Madero-Cabib et al., 2015), as well as to labor market disadvantage during adulthood (Caspi et al., 1998; Dragano & Wahrendorf, 2014; Flores, García-Gómez, & Kalwij, 2015; Wahrendorf et al., 2016). Yet, the latter studies are often based on prospective cohorts (particularly birth cohorts which have yet to reach Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/workar/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/workar/wax014/3867397 by University College London user on 21 November 2017