Introduction: Empirical research on health, ageing and retirement in Europe

In our introduction to this Special Issue of JESP, we first sketch what we know and what we do not know about the adaptation process to a society with a large proportion of older individuals. We develop a framework of empirical analysis which exploits the power of multidisciplinary, longitudinal and cross-national comparative data collection. Second, we provide a brief overview of SHARE, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. The 2004-05 baseline wave and the first longitudinal wave of SHARE collected in 2006-07 provide data on the life circumstances of some 45,000 individuals aged 50 and over in 14 European countries. SHARE constitutes a unique data infrastructure for researchers from various disciplines - notably economics, sociology and health - to better understand the individual and population ageing process. Third, we introduce the five studies in this Special Issue to show that the multidisciplinary, longitudinal and cross-national comparative data of SHARE permit a much better understanding of ageing and retirement in Europe than was possible before.