Increasing life expectancies and uncertainty about future retirement incomes are likely to lead to various changes in behaviour. As expectations are revised, one potentially important adjustment mechanism is in labour force participation rates. There is already evidence these are rising for...

This paper investigates the effects of retirement on various health outcomes. Data stem from the first three waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). With this informative data, non-parametric matching methods can be applied to identify causal effects. It is found that...

We explore the link between health indicators and employment rates of the population aged 55 or more. Our focus lies on work capacity as a key determinant of employment. Using cohort mortality information as a proxy for overall health outcomes, we establish a substantial untapped work capacity...

In most OECD member countries labor force attachment has increased in recent years in the 60+ group. Focus in the paper is on the development in this area in Denmark, Norway and Sweden since the 1990s. The development in the same period in the German labor market is included as a frame of...

Declining fertility rates and increasing life expectancy necessitate a higher labor participation rate among older people in order to sustain pension systems and boost economic growth. At the same time, researchers have only recently begun to pay attention to the health effects of a longer...

Many Belgian retire well before the statutory retirement age. Numerous exit routes from the labor force can be identified: old-age pensions, conventional early retirement, disability insurance, and unemployment insurance are the most prominent ones. We analyze the retirement decision of Belgian...

Finland’s population is set to age rapidly in the coming decades. This will put pressure on public finances, while shrinking labour resources. Nonetheless, solutions exist to alleviate those pressures. Adjusting the pension age in line with the rise in life expectancy would reduce pension...

This paper analyses the short- and long-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by regular state pension ages in a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design combined with individual-fixed effects to deal with endogeneity in retirement...

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...

There is much variation in the physical requirements across occupations, giving rise to great differences in later-life productivity, disability risk, and the value of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). In this paper, I look at how such differences across occupations affect initial...