Mental Health Effects of Retirement

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.

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“…(2016) find a decrease in depression. Picchio and Ours (2020) show heterogeneous effects by gender and marital status.…”

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confidence: 87%

Impact of later retirement on mortality: Evidence from France

2021

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“…This specificity with regard to the effect of retirement on informal care involvement is thus likely to reveal a more general difference in the way retirement reshapes social participation for single men. One potential channel is related to the drop in mental health of single men after retirement (Picchio & van Ours, 2019). Another potential mechanism is the activity-complementarity hypothesis put forward by the literature that examines the relationship between the different forms and types of productive activities at older ages.…”

Section: Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The heterogeneous effect of retirement on informal care behavior

Bergeot

Fontaine

2020

Health Economics

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It is often argued that the increased labor market participation of seniors threatens family support provided to dependent elderly people. The purpose of this paper is to assess the causal effect of retirement on the frequency of care provided by individuals aged 55–69 years to their elderly parent. Using data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we estimate an endogenous switching model that allows the retirement effect to be heterogeneous with respect to observed and unobserved characteristics. To tackle the possible endogeneity of selection into retirement, we use the heterogeneity of retirement rules between and within European countries. On average, being retired does not significantly impact the probability of providing care but significantly increases the frequency of care conditional on being caregiver. The same pattern is observed regardless of the individual observed characteristics, even if the provision of informal care appears to be less sensitive to the retirement status when the child cannot rely on the other parent to provide care or when both parents are in poor health. These results suggest that pension system reforms should not affect the number of caregivers. Some adverse effects on the intensity of involvement among caregivers are nevertheless expected.

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“…For example, Kolodziej and García-Gómez (2019) analysing panel data from 11 European countries find that although the effects are heterogeneous on average retirement improves mental health. Retiring may affect life satisfaction (Picchio and van Ours (2020)). For many workers who become unemployed, happiness drops substantially (e.g.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

What a drag it is getting old? Mental health and loneliness beyond age 50

Ours

2021

Applied Economics

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This paper studies mental health and loneliness in the Netherlands for individuals beyond age 50. The analysis is based on panel data over the period 2008 to 2018 and focuses on the effects of life events and ageing. It appears that mental health gets worse and loneliness increases if individuals lose their partner (through divorce or death) or become unemployed. On average, the mental health of males and high educated females improves at retirement. With respect to ageing, the main conclusions are that mental health improves while loneliness goes down at least up to the high 70s. From the perspective of mental health and loneliness, it does not seem to be a drag getting old. KEYWORDS Mental health; loneliness; age; old people JEL I31; J14 cohort. This is sometimes referred to as the Age-Period-Cohort (APC) identification problem. As will be discussed in more detail below, the current paper uses panel data and in all estimates, unobserved timeinvariant differences between individuals are accounted for. This removes the cohort effect and leaves one identification issue, i.e. a possible linear trend in age is indistinguishable from a possible linear trend in calendar time. Research on the effects of ageing on mental health and loneliness is related to research on happiness where there are quite a few studies on this CONTACT Jan C. van Ours

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Mental Health Effects of Retirement

Cited by 23 publications

References 67 publications

Impact of later retirement on mortality: Evidence from France

Impact of later retirement on mortality: Evidence from France

The heterogeneous effect of retirement on informal care behavior

What a drag it is getting old? Mental health and loneliness beyond age 50

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