Changes in subjective well-being with retirement: assessing savings adequacy

Garry Barrett and Milica Kecmanovic

Applied Economics, 2013, vol. 45, issue 35, 4883-4893

Abstract: Does retirement represent a state of relative prosperity or unanticipated hardship? To assess whether individuals are successful in smoothing their well-being across the transition to retirement we analyse measures of subjective well-being (SWB) in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Specifically, this research examines retirees' current standard of living, financial security and overall happiness relative to their pre-retirement levels. It is found SWB either improves or remains constant for the large majority of individuals as they retire from the labour force. However, there are significant disparities in changes in well-being with retirement among the group of retirees. In particular, the subset of individuals who are forced to retire early due to job loss or their own health, and who find their income in retirement to be much less than expected, report marked declines in their SWB with retirement.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2013.806786 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:applec:v:45:y:2013:i:35:p:4883-4893

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2013.806786

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().