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This study examines the relationship between the availability of one type of flexible work arrangement, time reduction policies (which allow employees to reduce the number of hours worked), and volunteer behavior among older adults. Volunteer behavior was assessed at the household level for married couples, combining the hours that both husband and wife spent contributing to civic and religious organizations. The sample, drawn from the 1992 through 2004 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) included 17,237 observations for 4,689 households with at least one respondent born between 1931 and 1941. Controlling for a range of demographic and work-related variables, the relationship between policies allowing employees to reduce hours worked and change in volunteering behavior is assessed. Among married couples, if both the husband and wife had access to policies that would allow them to reduce their hours worked, they are more likely to volunteer in subsequent years. For single respondents and for couples in which only one spouse reported that they could reduce their work hours, the effect on volunteering was nonsignificant. These findings suggest that employer policies that allow older workers to reduce their hours on the job encourage volunteering behavior. More research is needed to examine how the specific provisions of the time-reduction policies affect volunteering behavior in later life. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the attention paid to race and ethnicity in the retirement literature, much less is known about the role of acculturation. Using the 1992 through 2002 Health and Retirement Study data, this paper focuses on the relationship between race, ethnicity, and acculturation in the retirement decisions of workers between ages 51 and 71. Hierarchical linear models of 32,677 observations for 7,949 respondents were used to track the probability of working for up to ten years. The effect of acculturation, as measured by whether the respondent was born in the United States, interview language, and proportion of their life spent in the United States, was evaluated. Because only a small minority of these respondents (about 2 percent) had spent large proportions of their lives outside the United States or did not speak English, it was not possible to adequately evaluate the effects of higher levels of acculturation. However, the results suggest that the effect of becoming eligible for Social Security is stronger for respondents not born in the United States than for those born in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been many prior sociological studies of cross-national variation in life expectancy in developing nations and several of these have focused on female life expectancy. This study is one of the first to deal with a new measure of life expectancy referred to as healthy life expectancy, a measure that corrects for (subtracts) the years of very poor health. Hypotheses linked to modernization theory, dependency theory and gender stratification theory are tested in an analysis of 113 less developed nations. The major findings are as follows: The effects of predictors linked to dependency theory tend to be mediated by other variables. Support was found for hypotheses linked to modernization theory and gender stratification theory. AIDS rates turned out to be the strongest predictor of health status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the next few decades, the retirement of the baby-boom generation will strain existing programs targeted toward the elderly, such as Social Security and Medicare. To the extent that employer policies can encourage higher rates of labor force participation among older adults, they may be able to soften the potential economic burden of population aging. This study, using the Health and Retirement Study data, evaluates the relationship between labor force participation and two types of health-related employer policies: employer flexibility in number of hours worked and employer-provided health insurance. Particular attention is paid to the distinctions between retirement, reverse retirement, and joint retirement decisions. The findings suggest that while both types of policy provide an incentive for continued employment, the effectiveness of these policies is strongest for workers younger than the typical age of retirement, who are either currently employed or have been employed recently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]