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Older men: pushed into retirement in the 1970s and 1980s by the baby boomers?
Diane J. Macunovich
Diane J. Macunovich is chair of the department of economics at the University of Redlands, Redlands, CA. Email: diane_macunovich@redlands.edu.
The post-World War II baby boomers began entering the labor market in the late 1960s, and their numbers swelled through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Their large size, relative to the size of the cohort of workers ages 45-54, forced a whole host of dislocations for the boomers: high unemployment, low relative wages, and increasing proportions forced into parttime and part-year work.1 As this article will show, these dislocations reverberated among older workers, too.
1 Diane J. Macunovich, "The Fortunes of One's Birth: Relative Cohort Size and the Youth Labor Market in the U.S.," Journal of Population Economics, June 1999, pp. 215-272 and Birth Quake: The Baby Boom and Its Aftershocks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
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