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Retirement blues

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  • Heller-Sahlgren, Gabriel

Abstract

This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects instrumental-variable set-up, borrowing intuitions from the regression-discontinuity design literature, to deal with endogeneity in retirement behaviour. The results display no short-term effects of retirement on mental health, but a large negative longer-term impact. This impact survives a battery of robustness tests, and applies to women and men as well as people of different educational and occupational backgrounds similarly. Differences compared with previous research are attributed to the study's differentiation of short- and longer-term effects as well as its research design. Overall, the paper's findings suggest that reforms inducing people to postpone retirement are not only important for making pension systems solvent, but with time could also pay a mental health dividend among the elderly and reduce public health care costs.

Suggested Citation

  • Heller-Sahlgren, Gabriel, 2017. "Retirement blues," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 73079, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:73079
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    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/73079/
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    mental health; retirement; SHARE; instrumental variables;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • 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

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