The Role of Retiree Health Insurance in the Early Retirement of Public Sector Employees

John B. Shoven and Sita Slavov

No 19563, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Most private sector workers with employer-provided health insurance have a strong incentive to continue working until Medicare eligibility in order to maintain group health coverage. However, most government employees have access to retiree health coverage, which allows them access to group health coverage even if they retire before Medicare eligibility. We study the impact of retiree health coverage on the probability of stopping work among public sector workers between the ages of 55 and 64. We find that, for state and local government employees, retiree health coverage raises the probability of stopping work by 5.1 percentage points (around 28 percent) between ages 60 and 64. However, we find no evidence that retiree health coverage influences state and local employees' decisions to stop work at ages 55-59, or that such coverage has an effect on the probability of stopping work for federal and military employees.

JEL-codes: I1 J2 J3 J4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea, nep-ias, nep-lab and nep-lma
Note: AG
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published as Shoven, John B. & Slavov, Sita Nataraj, 2014. "The role of retiree health insurance in the early retirement of public sector employees," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 99-108.
Published as The Role of Retiree Health Insurance in the Early Retirement of Public Sector Employees , John B. Shoven, Sita Nataraj Slavov. in State and Local Health Plans for Active and Retired Public Employees , Clark and Newhouse. 2014

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19563.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The role of retiree health insurance in the early retirement of public sector employees (2014)
Chapter: The Role of Retiree Health Insurance in the Early Retirement of Public Sector Employees (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19563

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19563

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().