Pathways to retirement in West Germany: Does divorce matter?

The aim of this paper is to explore how divorce is linked to pathways to retirement in West Germany and to understand whether and how patterns are gendered. Using German pension insurance data, we employ sequence and cluster analysis to map and group pathways to retirement of women and men who retired in 2018. Pathways to retirement are defined based on monthly pension insurance histories from age 50 to 65. We find nine distinct pathways to retirement, ranging from unemployment to stable low to high income pathways and to an early retirement pathway through the reduced-earnings-capacity pension, the latter representing 9.3% of the sample. Based on multinomial logistic regression models, we analyse how marital status, distinguishing between divorced and (re)married, was related to different pathways to retirement. The results show that divorced people were more likely than married people to retire through indirect and unstable pathways to retirement characterised by early exit from the labour market and receipt of reduced-earnings-capacity pensions and/or unemployment benefits. Whereas the relationship between divorce and pathways to retirement seemed to be overall unfavourable for men, the results for women are more ambiguous. Divorced women were also more likely to retire through a stable high-income pathway than married women. Nevertheless, the results suggest that divorce is associated with an early retirement pathway through the reduced-earnings-capacity pension for both women and men.