Global crisis: how the market crash will affect retirement?

Coile and Levine argue that the answer is far from clear: on one hand, the lower value of funds and other assets (as houses) will induce workers to pospone retirement, but the weak labor market may push these persons out of the labor force, and look for retirement. In their long term (they have data for 30 years) analysis they find that workers age 62 to 69 are responsive to the unemployment rate and to long-run fluctuations in stock market returns. Less-educated workers are more sensitive to labor market conditions and more-educated workers are more sensitive to stock market conditions. They also find no evidence that workers age 55 to 61 respond to these fluctuations or that workers at any age respond to fluctuating housing markets. On net, they predict that the increase in retirement attributable to the rising unemployment rate will be almost 50 percent larger than the decrease in retirement brought about by the stock market crash.