The "job-stopping" process of older workers often includes some combination of postcareer "bridge" employment, partial retirement, and reverse retirement. Fewer than two-fifths of household heads retire directly from career jobs, over half partially retire at some point in their working lives, and a quarter reenter the labor force after initially retiring. In addition, postcareer employment is frequently located outside the industry and occupation of the career job, and there are important differences in postcareer labor force experiences by gender, permanent income, and career-job pension status.

Cross-sectional wage regressions overstate the extent to which earnings increase with job seniority because they fail to take account of the sorting which occurs when high wage workers have lower rates of mobility. The main source of bias is a negative correlation between turnover probabilities and (unobserved) market valued individual characteristics which are transferable across firms. These results argue for the importance of theories which emphasize generally applicable individual differences and against those which focus on firm-specific attributes.