Department of Social Policy and Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE London, UK; Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Stockholm, Sweden.
J Health Econ. 2017 Jul;54:66-78. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2017.03.007. Epub 2017 Mar 31.
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. Overall, the 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.
本文分析了退休对十个欧洲国家人群心理健康的短期和长期影响。它利用个体固定效应工具变量设定中由国家养老金年龄产生的门槛，借鉴回归不连续性设计文献中的直觉，来解决退休行为的内生性问题。结果显示，退休对心理健康没有短期影响，但有较大的负向长期影响。这一影响在一系列稳健性测试中仍然存在，并且对不同教育和职业背景的女性和男性同样适用。总的来说，这些发现表明，促使人们推迟退休的改革不仅对使养老金体系保持偿付能力很重要，而且随着时间的推移，还可以为老年人带来心理健康红利，并降低公共医疗保健成本。
