Do people with a different employment background age differently? European evidence from the SHARE survey

The landscape in the second half of the twentieth century was characterized in Europe by two divides. One was that between insiders and outsiders in the labor market, often associated with membership of the public sector, which enjoyed, in most places a privileged status relative to the rest of the labor market. The other divide was built around gender – the male breadwinner model. The pension system, however, is supposed to operate in an equalizing direction, ironing out employment-based inequities. This paper tests whether and to what extent inequalities persist in retirement. It does so by direct comparisons of privileged groups relative to less privileged groups of a large international sample survey of individuals aged 50+, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), using the fifth wave conducted in 2013. The comparison proceeds by means of odds ratios applied to dimensions of outcomes related to well-being: life satisfaction; better health; chances of a better financial status. This is done for cases of pensioners where the key distinguishing feature is simple presence of someone who used to be employed worked in the public sector. This comparison is also applied at a household level, where in addition to the public-sector effect, hypotheses related to the male breadwinner model can also be approached. The results in general confirm that public sector retirees tend to fare better than their coevals, even with the relatively blunt statistical instrument checking for overall outcomes.