IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crr/crrwps/wp2008-11.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Will People Be Healthy Enough to Work Longer?

Author

Listed:
  • Alicia H. Munnell
  • Mauricio Soto
  • Alex Golub-Sass

Abstract

If Americans continue to retire at age 63, a great many will risk income shortfalls especially at older ages. Because work directly increases current income, Social Security benefits, retirement saving, and decreases the length of retirement, a logical solution would be to increase the age of retirement. But are Americans healthy enough to work longer? Using the National Health Interview Study, this paper shows that healthy life expectancy increased by about three years over 1970-2000 for the average 50-year old man. This increase is largely the result of men moving up the education ladder, with minimal increases within educational groups. Moreover, major disparities in healthy life expectancy remain between those in the bottom and top quartiles of the population. And these disparities mean that a vulnerable portion of the population – perhaps those who most need to work longer – might not be able to extend their work lives.

Suggested Citation

  • Alicia H. Munnell & Mauricio Soto & Alex Golub-Sass, 2008. "Will People Be Healthy Enough to Work Longer?," Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College wp2008-11, Center for Retirement Research, revised Aug 2008.
    • Handle: RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2008-11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/will-people-be-healthy-enough-to-work-longer-2/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Beatrice Scheubel & Daniel Schunk & Joachim Winter, 2009. "Don't Raise the Retirement Age! An Experiment on Opposition to Pension Reforms and East-West Differences in Germany," CESifo Working Paper Series 2752, CESifo.
    2. Roel Beetsma & Alessandro Bucciol, 2011. "Risk Sharing in Defined-Contribution Funded Pension Systems," CESifo Working Paper Series 3640, CESifo.
    3. Gurvich, Ye., 2011. "Long-Term Demographic Challenges and Pension Policy," Journal of the New Economic Association, New Economic Association, issue 9, pages 193-196.
    4. Kenichiro Kashiwase & Mr. Masahiro Nozaki & Kiichi Tokuoka, 2012. "Pension Reforms in Japan," IMF Working Papers 2012/285, International Monetary Fund.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2008-11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amy Grzybowski or Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crrbcus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.