Health Indexes and Retirement Modeling in International Comparisons

Erik Meijer, Arie Kapteyn and Tatiana Andreyeva

No WR-614, Working Papers from RAND Corporation

Abstract: It is widely believed that health plays a major role in retirement decisions. The most important problem in including health in retirement models is the lack of availability of a good measure of health at the individual level in existing data sets. This problem is exacerbated when a model spanning multiple countries is desired, because self-reports on health may not be comparable across countries. Arguably, physical measures are less influenced by cultural and linguistic differences than self-reports on general health or even on health conditions. The authors develop a cross-country measurement model for health in which the relations between functional limitations, self-reports, and physical measures like grip strength are used to construct health indexes. Comparability across countries is achieved by using the physical measurements to define the measurement scales, and allowing other parameters to vary across countries to account for cultural and linguistic differences in response patterns. The usefulness of the health indexes is then investigated by including it in some simple retirement models.

JEL-codes: C35 C81 I19 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2008-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/working_papers/2008/RAND_WR614.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:ran:wpaper:wr-614

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from RAND Corporation Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benson Wong ().