Gaining weight through retirement? Results from the SHARE survey

In this paper, we use IV-techniques to identify the causal e ect of retirement among the 50-69 year-old on Body Mass Index (BMI) and related weight measures. Based on the 2004 and 2006 waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the identi cation strategy exploits the European variation in retirement schemes to produce an exogeneous shock in retirement behaviour. Our results show that retirement induced by discontinuous incentives in social security systems causes a 0.20 point increase in the probability of being overweight or obese.