This paper investigates the impact of delaying retirement on mortality among the French population. We take advantage of the 1993 pension reform in the private sector to identify the causal effect of an increase in claiming age on mortality. We use administrative data which provide detailed information on career characteristics, dates of birth and death. Our results, precisely estimated, show that an exogenous increase of one year in the claiming age has no significant impact on the probability to die, measured between age 61 and 79, even when we allow for nonlinear effects of treatment intensity. To test the power of our sample to detect statistically significant effects for rare events like death, we compute minimum detectable effects (MDEs). Our MDE estimates suggest that, if an impact of later retirement on mortality would be detectable, it would remain very small in magnitude.

The prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome (amniocentesis) presents parents with a complex dilemma which requires comparing the risk of giving birth to an affected child and the risk of losing an unaffected child through amniocentesis-related miscarriage. Building on the specific features of the French Health insurance system, this paper shows that variation in the monetary costs of the diagnosis procedure may have a very significant impact on how parents solve this ethical dilemma. The French institutions make it possible to compare otherwise similar women facing very different reimbursement schemes and we find that eligibility to full reimbursement has a largely positive effect on the probability of taking an amniocentesis test. By contrast, the sole fact of being labelled 'high-risk' by the Health system seems to have, as such, only a modest effect on subsequent choices. Finally, building on available information on post-amniocentesis outcomes, we report new evidence suggesting that amniocentesis increases the risk of premature birth and low weight at birth.

We investigate the causal effect of retirement on health through literature. We explore the potential mechanisms which explain three effects: the switch from employment to retirement, later retirement, and earlier retirement. The empirical strategies used to identify the causal effects are mainly based on the observation of changes in health status at the legal age for retirement entitlement or on reforms that have led to changes in retirement incentives. Literature renders possible to make several observations on the average effect estimation. Retirement leads to better self-reported health, less depression, a decrease in healthcare consumption, a decline in cognition and an ambiguous effect on physical health. Later retirement has no effect on mortality, decreases healthcare consumption, and has a negative or non-significant impact on self-reported health. Studies on the impact of earlier retirement are scarce due to few natural experiments exploiting such a variation. Lastly, some studies find evidence of heterogeneous effects by gender and occupational status. As there are relatively few studies on this aspect, the question should be seriously explored in future research.