IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/esr/wpaper/wp531.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Use It or Lose It : Irish Evidence

Author

Listed:
  • Mosca, Irene
  • Wright, Robert E.

Abstract

A small but growing body of research suggests that retirement and cognitive decline are related. In fact, some have argued that retirement causes cognitive decline. The aim of this paper is to add to this literature using data of older women from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Ordinary least square (OLS) regressions show a significant negative association between retirement duration – defined as time elapsed since last job ended – and cognition. This association is, however, very small when compared to the association of age or education with cognition. As retirement is potentially endogenous to cognition, instrumental variable (IV) methods are also used. The instrument employed is the abolition of the so-called "Marriage Bar". In simple terms, the Marriage Bar was the requirement that women leave paid employment on getting married. It was established in the 1930s and removed in the 1970s. When IV estimations are used, the effect of retirement duration is statistically insignificant. Differences between OLS and IV estimates are compared with a standard test. OLS estimates are preferred as there is no statistical evidence that retirement duration is endogenous. As OLS estimates are very small, it is extremely unlikely that working into old age has much of an impact on slowing cognitive decline amongst older people.

Suggested Citation

  • Mosca, Irene & Wright, Robert E., 2016. "Use It or Lose It : Irish Evidence," Papers WP531, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
  • Handle: RePEc:esr:wpaper:wp531
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.esri.ie/pubs/WP531.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    data/education/employment/older/regression;

    JEL classification:

    • J14 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-Labor Market Discrimination
    • J26 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Retirement; Retirement Policies

    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:esr:wpaper:wp531. 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: Sarah Burns (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esriiie.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.