Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Retirement and Health
A major question for practically every industrial economy is the extent to which its aging population can support retirement payments. One solution has been to think about increasing the retirement age or certainly removing barriers for people who wish to work into their late sixties. I have never been given a compelling case for not trying to do this in a world where older life expectancy has increased by so much. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that retiring is bad for one's health. A recent IZA paper examines this empirically - link here
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2 comments:
That looks like a really interesting & important paper. If the SHARE folk are followed then it could make for a useful replication exercise.
As far as I know the choice of 65 as a retirement age was due to Bismarck who applied to the Prussian civil service. Life expectancy was lower then, pretty close to - and maybe lower than- 65.
There are other studies from SHARE looking at the predictors of retirement. The role of working conditions is flagged in some of the papers. The transition to retirement is one of the most important areas of study for countries like Ireland and our knowledge at present is pretty scarce.
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