Labour force participation and retirement in the UK Paper prepared for National Academy of Science Richard Blundell and Sarah Tanner Institute for Fiscal Studies 1 December 1999 1. Introduction Retirement behaviour is an important but under-researched topic in Britain. This is in spite of dramatic changes in the labour market behaviour of older workers. Participation rates for men aged 55-64 have fallen by around 20 percentage points over the last 25 years and while there has been less of a fall in employment among older women this contrasts with rising levels of employment among younger women. In spite of this the issue of retirement has been subject to little serious econometric analysis. 2 Undoubtedly one reason for this has been a lack of suitable data sets, in contrast to the United States. The recent availability of a new panel dataset on a cohort of older individuals, the UK Retirement Survey, redresses the balance, but only to a limited extent. Unlike the retirement panel studies in the US, the UK Retirement Survey has only two waves of information and suffers from very a high rate of attrition between the two waves. In this paper we describe the information available in the Retirement Survey, together with other sources of data that might be used by someone wanting to study retirement behaviour in the UK. It also summarises recent trends in labour market participation that emerge from these sources of information. 1 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE. E-mail sarah_tanner@ifs.org.uk 2 Notable exceptions are Zabalza, Pissarides and Barton (1980) and Meghir and Whitehouse (1997) © Institute for Fiscal Studies, 1999