Looking across many diseases, average health among mature men is much worse in America compared to England. Second, there exists a steep negative health gradient for men in both countries where men at the bottom of the economic hierarchy are in much worse health than those at the top. This...

This paper estimates how much additional work capacity there might be among men and women aged between 55 and 74 in the United Kingdom, given their health, and how this has evolved over the last decade. The objective is not to suggest how much older people should work but rather to shed light on...

Following an era of a development towards earlier retirement, there has been a reversed trend to later exit from the labor market in Sweden since the late 1990s. We investigate whether or not there are potentials, with respect to health and work capacity of the population, for extending this...

To what extent is the length of our lives determined by pre-birth factors? And to what extent is it affected by parental resources during our upbringing that can be influenced by public policy? We study the formation of adult health and mortality using data on about 21,000 adoptees born between...

In this paper, we investigate the issue of partner selection in the health of individuals who are at least fifty years old in England and the United States. We find a strong and positive association in family background variables including education of partners and their parents. Adult health...

In this paper we examine how an education policy intervention - the introduction of a comprehensive school in Sweden that increased the number of compulsory years of schooling, affected cognitive and non-cognitive skills and long-term health. We use detailed administrative data combined with...

We examine the effects of a major Swedish educational reform, that increased the years of compulsory schooling, on mortality and health. Using the gradual phase-in of the reform between 1949 and 1962 across municipalities, we estimate insignificant effects of the reform on mortality in the...

In this paper we examine the link between retrospectively reported measures of childhood health and the prevalence of various major and minor diseases at older ages. Our analysis is based on comparable retrospective questionnaires placed in the Health and Retirement Study and the English...

This paper describes the development of population health and disability insurance utilization for older workers in Sweden and analyzes the relation between the two. We use three different measures of population health: (1) the mortality rate (measured between 1950 and 2009); (2) the prevalence...

Over the last thirty years pathways to retirement have changed substantially in the UK. They have been dominated by spells of unemployment in the late 1970s, with then an increased importance of disability spells from the mid-1980s onwards. At the end of the period the direct route from work to...