IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/nbr/nberch/12382.html

Disability, Health and Retirement in the United Kingdom

In: Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: Historical Trends in Mortality and Health, Employment, and Disability Insurance Participation and Reforms

Author

Listed:
  • James Banks
  • Richard Blundell
  • Antoine Bozio
  • Carl Emmerson

Abstract

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 retirement was increasingly more common. General economic conditions seem to have been important driving forces during the entire period. In contrast changes in health do not seem to provide convincing explanations for these trends: mortality has been falling over the period without any apparent link to the share of the population reporting ill health or disability or to the number claiming benefits. We also find evidence that recent reforms have had some impact. The halting of the previous growth in the rate of in-flow onto disability benefits in the mid-1990s coincided with the implementation of a major reform. Evidence from the pilots of the Pathways-to-Work programme in 2003-2005 suggests that those moving onto disability benefits moved off these benefits faster than they would otherwise have done as a direct result of the programme.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • James Banks & Richard Blundell & Antoine Bozio & Carl Emmerson, 2012. "Disability, Health and Retirement in the United Kingdom," NBER Chapters, in: Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: Historical Trends in Mortality and Health, Employment, and Disability Insurance Participatio, pages 41-77, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberch:12382
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c12382.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Lindeboom, Maarten & Llena-Nozal, Ana & van der Klaauw, Bas, 2016. "Health shocks, disability and work," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 186-200.
    2. James Banks & Richard Blundell & Carl Emmerson, 2015. "Disability Benefit Receipt and Reform: Reconciling Trends in the United Kingdom," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 29(2), pages 173-190, Spring.
    3. Iuliana-Claudia MIHALACHE & Felicia-Cătălina APETROI (RĂCOARE) & Mihaela TOMAZIU-TODOSIA & Olesea PLOTNIC, 2021. "The importance of health status for the financial sustainability of the pension system. A case study of Romania in the context of the EU," CES Working Papers, Centre for European Studies, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, vol. 12(4), pages 282-297, February.
    4. David Wise, 2010. "Facilitating longer working lives: International evidence on why and how," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 47(1), pages 131-149, March.
    5. Vandenberghe Vincent, 2021. "Differentiating retirement age to compensate for health differences," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Sciendo & Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 11(1), pages 1-34, May.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions
    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs

    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:nbr:nberch:12382. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.