Abstract
This article studies the role of working conditions and health for elderly female day-care teachers’ decision to enter early retirement. Entry into retirement is analysed in a duration framework that allows for unobserved heterogeneity in the baseline hazard. Data are from a Danish longitudinal data set based on administrative register records for 1997–2006. Working conditions are measured by four indicators. First, work pressure is measured by the child-to-teacher ratio, which varies across municipalities and over time. Second, working conditions are measured by the proportion of children with a problematic social background. Third, the share of trained teachers is considered an indicator of working conditions. And fourth, the size of the institution is assessed as an indicator of working conditions. Regressions in a duration model framework show that there is no significant relationship between the child-to-teacher ratio or the size of the institution and early retirement. However, working conditions measured by the social background of the children and the share of trained day-care teachers have a significant effect on the probability of early retirement. Finally, a poor health condition is associated with a higher propensity to enter early retirement.
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Notes
Presently, the proposal remains to be decided by the parliament.
Estimations were performed in Stata. Two estimation procedures were used, xtcloglog which assumes that the unobserved heterogeneity is normally distributed and constant over time, and the pgmhaz8 estimation procedure which assumes Gamma-distributed unobserved heterogeneity, see Jenkins (1995) and http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/iser/teaching/module-ec968.
Standard errors in models (1), (2) and (5), (6) are bootstrapped (500 replications) to accommodate clustering in municipalities of the child-to-teacher ratio (see Cameron et al. 2008). Bootstrapping was not feasible for models (3), (4) and (7), (8) due probably to a large set of interaction terms, but given that there were only minor differences between default standard errors and bootstrapped standard errors in the estimation of models (1), (2) and (5), (6), the use of ordinary standard errors seems acceptable.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Nabanita Datta Gupta, Mona Larsen, Henrik Lindegaard Andersen, Pierre-Carl Michaud, two anonymous referees and participants at the EALE 2009 Conference in Tallinn and the Netspar 2011 workshop in Amsterdam for useful comments and suggestions. Funding from the Danish Working Environment Research Fund is kindly acknowledged.
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Responsible Editor: H.-W. Wahl.
Data has been available through Statistics Denmark’s micro data base for researchers. See http://www.dst.dk/HomeUK/ForSale/Research/acces.aspx. Programs for data generation and estimation are available from the author upon request.
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Gørtz, M. Early retirement in the day-care sector: the role of working conditions and health. Eur J Ageing 9, 187–198 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-011-0214-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-011-0214-4