The causal effects of retirement on mental health: Looking beyond the mean effects

Ingo Kolodziej and Pilar Garcia-Gomez

No 668, Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen

Abstract: We analyze the causal effect of retirement on mental health, exploiting differences in retirement eligibility ages across countries and over time using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. We estimate not only average effects, but also use distributional regression to examine whether these effects are unequally distributed across the mental health distribution. We find unequally distributed protective effects of retirement on mental health. These gains are larger among those above the clinically defined threshold of being at risk of depression. The preserving effects are larger for women, blue collar workers and those in social networks.

Keywords: retirement; mental health; economics of the elderly; distributional regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J14 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur and nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:rwirep:668

DOI: 10.4419/86788775

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