JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources. ABSTRACT Partial retirement is a quantitatively important retirement state that shows significant structural differences from behavioral functions of either full retirement or full-time work. Alternative models of the choice of retirement state are estimated on a sample of white married males from the Retirement History Survey, 1967-1973. Findings suggest that, while partial retirement appears to take several different forms, the critical choice for a large number of older workers appears to be that of labor force participation first, with either partial or full-time employment determined conditionally among participants. The model has good explanatory power and conforms to expectations of the effects of various relevant variables on labor supply decisions.It has become increasingly clear that the retirement process is far more complex than suggested by the simple dichotomy between full-time employment and full retirement. Significant numbers of older workers spend considerable amounts of time in the intermediate state of partial retirement, a single term covering a variety of retirement forms. Partial retirement may occur in the main lifetime job with adjustments in the work contract allowing for reduced hours or responsibilities. More often it involves a change ofjob and frequently a transition into self-employment. These changes may be related to acceptance of pension benefits or to

Analyses by race and ethnicity of several important dimensions of labor market behavior have been constrained in the past by limited samples of the African American and Hispanic populations. This article uses data from the first wave of the Health and Retirement Survey, which oversamples these populations, to compare the retirement plans of African American, Hispanic, and white married men and women. Findings suggest that retirement expectations may accurately forecast retirement behavior and that the differences by race and ethnicity, as well as by gender, that are evident in retirement plans are likely to be reflected in retirement outcomes.

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