Historical and cross-country differences in life satisfaction across retirement in Germany and Switzerland from 2000-2019

Abstract

Objectives. Recent trends such as changes in pension systems or cohort differences in individual resources have altered the face of retirement transitions. Little is known about how these trends affected older people’s life satisfaction around retirement age in the past decades. Here, we investigated how levels and changes in life satisfaction before and after retirement changed with historical time in Germany and Switzerland. Method. We used longitudinal data from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (SOEP) and the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) from 2000 to 2019. Level, pre-retirement change as well as short- and long-term change in life satisfaction (0 – 10) after retirement were predicted by year of retirement (2001-2019) in a multigroup piecewise growth curve model. Results. We found improvements of levels, as well as pre- and post-retirement change in life satisfaction with historical time in both countries. Furthermore, we found that in the SOEP, short-time change in life satisfaction across-retirement improved over historical time only among higher educated retirees, not among lower educated retirees. Discussion. Our findings imply that life satisfaction trajectories around retirement age have improved in the last 20 years. These findings may be explained by general improvements in health and psychosocial functioning of older people. Nevertheless, there is evidence for increasing social inequalities in life satisfaction, which may be taken into account in the design of pensions systems.