Healthy retirement begins at school: educational differences in the health outcomes of early transitions into retirement

Abstract

The literature on socio-economic variations in the association between retirement timing and health is inconclusive and largely limited to the moderating role of occupation. By selecting the sample case of Mexico where a sizeable number of older adults have no or very little formal education, this study allows the moderating role of education to be tested properly. Drawing on panel data for 2,430 individuals age 50 and over from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS) and combining propensity score matching models with fixed-effects regressions, this article investigates differences in the health effects of retirement timing between older adults with varying years of education. Subjective health is measured using a self-reported assessment of respondents’ overall health and physical health as a reverse count of doctor-diagnosed chronic diseases. The results indicate that early transitions into retirement are associated with worse health outcomes, but education fully compensates for the detrimental association with subjective and physical health, while adjusting for baseline health, demographics and socio-economic characteristics. In conclusion, formal education during childhood and adolescence is associated with a long-term protective effect on health. It attenuates negative health consequences of early retirement transitions. Policies and programmes promoting healthy and active ageing would benefit from considering the influence of formal education in shaping older adults’ health after the transition into retirement.

A New Path to Address Multimorbidity? Longitudinal Analyses of Retirement Sequences and Chronic Diseases in Old Age

“…Partly consistent with previous evidence that non-working status and transitions into unemployment and retirement increase the probability of having chronic conditions (Allel et al, 2019; Hessel, 2016; Staudinger et al, 2016), we found that age-related increases in the number of chronic diseases (Kingston et al, 2018; Stenholm et al, 2015) were more pronounced in sequences characterized by weak ties to the labor force through ages 70 to 71. However, men in the late , and surprisingly also men and women in the early and ambiguous retirement sequences, experienced slower increases than individuals in the complete sequence.…”

“…Having more chronic conditions negatively affects labor-market participation of older adults and is associated with transitions to unemployment, disability, and retirement (Cabral et al, 2019; De Boer et al, 2018; Van Zon et al, 2020). Growing evidence suggests that the causal relationship is bidirectional: non-working status and transitions into unemployment and retirement also increase the probability of having one or more chronic conditions (Allel et al, 2019; Hessel, 2016; Staudinger et al, 2016).…”

Older adults’ accounts of the relationships between retirement timing and health: a descriptive qualitative analysis in Chile

“…occupational status, job-related stresses and hazards, job satisfaction, retirement income, SES resources for health maintenance and promotion) as mediators and moderators would be necessary to test whether our participants’ views have broader salience, including how these patterns may vary across country-specific contexts. This emphasis on socio-economic characteristics related to retirement health is consistent with recent research on mental health and retirement among British civil servants (Fleischmann et al ., 2020), the influence of work complexity on post-retirement cognitive function in a Swedish study (Andel et al ., 2016), the moderating role of job complexity on post-retirement cognitive decline in Japan (Kajitani et al ., 2017) and the moderating effect of education on the detrimental health effects of early retirements in Mexico (Allel et al ., 2019). More studies are needed, however, that can test and show influences of various dimensions of social class on varied dimensions of health regarding the retirement transition.…”

“…Generally, few studies explore patterns related to these topics in Latin American countries (Fisher et al ., 2016). However, findings from two recent studies in Latin America are consistent with the postulate that retirements that happen too early are detrimental to health (León et al ., 2020; Allel et al ., 2021). These studies also document substantial gender and class variations that have been largely overlooked in existing literature.…”

“…The first study analysed panel data from the Chilean Social Protection Survey and found detrimental health effects of early retirements but documented important gender differences in the health benefit of continued employment: for women the protective effect of working persisted beyond the legal retirement age of 60 years, while for men prolonging work life after the legal retirement age of 65 was associated with increasingly lower levels of functional health (León et al ., 2020). The second study analysed panel data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study and documented differences in the health effects of retirement timing between older adults with varying years of education: early transitions into retirement were associated with worse health outcomes for older adults with no formal education, while retirement timing had no association with health for older adults with some formal education (Allel et al ., 2021).…”