With job availability limited, many baby boomers are delaying retirement. However, this isn't coming at the expense of young workers being employed, a new study indicates.
Researchers from Boston College's Center for Retirement Research recently conducted a study to see whether older individuals were, in effect, crowding out younger workers from obtaining a job.
Surprisingly, they found that the opposite was true. For every one percentage point increase in the number of 55-to-64-year-olds working, there was a corresponding one-tenth of a percent dip in youth unemployment and a 0.2 percent rise in employment. In addition, the hours 20-to-24 year olds worked increased 0.13 percent.
In their issue brief, the researchers wrote that these findings could have a major influence on business owners' hiring trends.
"Employers already have reservations about older workers, so adding the false argument that retaining older workers hurts younger ones could impede the ability of older workers to remain in the labor force," they wrote.
Future research may want to analyze whether retaining older workers puts an added strain on employee benefit plan administration.
