Technology, Skills and Retirement

In our work we study the role of skills in the retirement decision by investigating whether individuals who are more technologically endowed, ceteris paribus, tend to retire later. Although more than a decade of re-search on skill biased technological change has proved that observed and unobserved skills are crucial determinants of wages and employment sta-tus, few empirical studies investigate the relation between workers tech-nological skills and their retirement decisions. In our work we provide new evidence based on an Italian panel data set (the Bank of Italy Survey on Households Income and Wealth). Our results show that better edu-cated male employees who are able to use a computer tend to retire later, that this e¤ect is magni\u85ed if the worker does use a PC on the job, it is stronger in a four years horizon rather than a two year horizon, and its magnitude is remarkably larger than what observed in US and Germany. We also show that the same skills seem not to play a crucial role in the retirement decision of women. Our results are robust to the estimation strategy adopted.