This paper studies empirically the consequences of retirement on health. We make use of a targeted retirement offer to army employees 55 years of age or older. Before the offer was implemented in the Swedish defense, the normal retirement age was 60 years of age. Estimating the effect of the offer on individuals' health within the age range 56-70, we find support for a reduction in both mortality and in inpatient care as a consequence of the early retirement offer. Increasing the mandatory retirement age may thus not only have positive government income effects but also negative effects on increasing government health care expenditures.
This paper studies empirically the consequences of retirement on health. We make use of a targeted retirement offer to army employees 55 years of age or older. Before the offer was implemented in the Swedish defense, the normal retirement age was 60 years of age. Estimating the effect of the offer on individuals' health within the age range 56-70, we find support for a reduction in both mortality and in inpatient care as a consequence of the early retirement offer. Increasing the mandatory retirement age may thus not only have positive government income effects but also negative effects on increasing government health care expenditures.
Abstract The typical family in the US is now a dual-earner couple, yet there are relatively few studies that examine the retirement decision in a household framework, particularly outside the context of a structural model. This paper explores how husbands' and wives' retirement behavior is influenced by their own financial incentives from Social Security and private pensions and by "spillover effects" from their spouses' incentives. Spillover effects are possible due to income effects and complementarity of leisure; if significant, their omission will bias estimates of the effect of changing Social Security policy on retirement. I estimate reduced-form retirement models and find that men and women are similarly responsive to their own incentives: an increase of $1,000 in the return to additional work is associated with a reduction of 0.9% of baseline retirement for men and 1.3% of baseline retirement for women. I find that men are very responsive to their wives' financial incentives but that women are not responsive to their husbands' incentives and present evidence to suggest that this may be due to asymmetric complementarities of leisure. Policy simulations indicate that estimates of the effect of a policy change on the probability of men working at age 65 are biased by 13% to 20% if spillover effects are omitted.
