Retirement Blues

Gabriel Heller Sahlgren ()
Additional contact information
Gabriel Heller Sahlgren: London School of Economics, Postal: and the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), https://www.ifn.se/en/researchers/affiliated-researchers/gabriel-heller-sahlgren//
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren

No 1114, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects instrumental-variable set-up, borrowing intuitions from the regression-discontinuity design literature, to deal with endogeneity in retirement behaviour. The results display no short-term effects of retirement on mental health, but a large negative longer-term impact. This impact survives a battery of robustness tests, and applies to women and men as well as people of different educational and occupational backgrounds similarly. Overall, the findings suggest that reforms inducing people to postpone retirement are not only important for making pension systems solvent, but with time could also pay a mental health dividend among the elderly and reduce public health care costs.

Keywords: Mental Health; Retirement; SHARE; Instrumental Variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J14 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2016-03-09, Revised 2017-05-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur, nep-hea and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Retirement blues (2017)
Working Paper: Retirement blues (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1114

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