‘Unretirement’ may be viable well into the future, study says

investmentnews.com:

Working and “unretirement” have become themes for older Americans, and a recent study suggests that’s unlikely to change – as long as people want to stay in the labor market.

Currently, employers view older workers as being at least as valuable as younger ones, and evidence suggests that in most professions, productivity does not decline substantially with age.

A paper this month from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found “a case for tempered optimism” about the prospects for working past traditional retirement ages. The author, Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, evaluated aspects of several studies on the topic to get a more comprehensive picture of the future of work for older people.

“Very few employers view older workers as less productive. The majority say that older workers are equally productive, with a large fraction seeing them as more productive,” Sanzenbacher wrote. “On the cost side, the news is less positive. While the majority of employers see older workers as equally costly, a sizable minority see them as more costly than younger ones.”

But an outlier in the productivity comparison between younger and older workers was financial services – that industry showed a significant reduction in productivity with age, the paper noted.

To see if there were companies intentionally recruiting older workers, Sanzenbacher collected data from an employment board targeted at people 50 and up, RetirementJobs.com. Generally, pay for jobs posted on the site was higher than that for comparable roles for workers of any age advertised elsewhere.

“Another piece of good news is that the jobs are more likely to be full-time positions,” he wrote. “The main caveat is that these jobs seem less likely to mention either health