Unemployment pushes workers into early retirement in the United States

The Social Security Adminstration of the United States has reported that the fillings for retirement applications increased by 20 per cent, five percentage points higher than they had predicted to be (15 per cent increase). The increase in early retirenment may be explained by the difficulty to find a job by persons in their sixties. Coile and Levine (2009) predicted that the increase in retirement attibutable to the rising unemployment were going to be 50 percent larger than the decrease in retirement brought about by the stock market crash. Apparentely they were right. See their interesting paper here.