Social support is increasingly acknowledged as an important resource for promoting wellbeing. We test whether social support changes around retirement. We also examine whether social support moderates dynamics in mental wellbeing around retirement and consider both own and spouse's retirement....

I estimate the effect of additional pension benefits on women's retirement decisions by examining a German pension subsidy program for low-pay workers. The subsidies have a kinked relationship with the recipients' past contributions, creating a sharply different slope of benefits for similar...

This paper provides a clear and transparent setting to study the effect of additional pension benefits on women's retirement decision. Using administrative pension insurance records from Germany, I examine the impact of a pension subsidy program to low pay workers, implemented in 1992. The...

In China, tobacco consumption is a leading risk factor for non-communicable diseases, and understanding the pattern of socio-economic inequalities of tobacco consumption will, thus, help to develop targeted policies of public health control. Data came from the China Health and Retirement...

A feature of employment at older ages that has been observed in many countries, including Ireland, is the higher share of self-employment among older labour force participants. This pattern of higher self-employment rates at the end of the labour market career may reflect lower rates of...

People may have imperfect information about their health status and thus make suboptimal decisions in insurance participation. Using national representative samples of the elderly in US and China, we find that people with lower socio-economic status and poorer health are relatively less likely...

We study the effect of state medical marijuana laws on labor supply among older adults; the demographic group with the highest rates of many health conditions for which marijuana may be an effective treatment. We use the Health and Retirement Study to study this question and estimate...

The few studies that have attempted to identify the causal effects of retirement on mental health and well-being have provided conflicting evidence. Hence, whether retirement affects mental health positively or negatively is still unclear. Our primary objective is to investigate the impact of...

It is now common to use the individual's self-assessed-health-status (SAHS) as a measure of health. The use of SAHS is supported by numerous studies that show that SAHS is a better predictor of mortality and morbidity than medical records. The 2011 wave of the rich Survey of Health Aging and...

In this study, we investigate the anatomy of older workers' wages. The central question is whether the wage cushion – i.e., the difference between actual wages and collectively agreed-upon (maximum) contractual wages – contributes to the fact that wages continue increasing at older ages. We...