Abstract
Retirement from paid work is a major transitional point and can have large impacts on lifestyle choices and subsequent health. Using eight waves of data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), this paper assesses impacts of both own and partner’s retirement on health and health behaviour by examining heterogeneous effects. We focus on individuals who retired from paid work and estimate fixed effects regression using state pension age (SPA) as an instrumental variable. Our results suggest that whilst own retirement improves health outcomes and increases the probability of engaging in more physical activity, the retirement of a partner does not influence the health or health behaviour of the other partner. The results from sub-sample regressions focusing on differences by sex, education, wealth, and occupation are consistent with these main findings, and find no significant impacts of partner retirement on own health or health behaviour in these sub-groups. Our results for the full sample and the sub-groups are mostly robust to changes in sample restriction and model specification, with only a small number of changes in absolute coefficient size. The results may suggest a role for targeted interventions, particularly amongst those with fewer years of education, lower wealth and some occupational groups.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 381-412 |
| Number of pages | 32 |
| Journal | Journal of Population Ageing |
| Volume | 15 |
| Early online date | 8 Jul 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jun 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding: The Health Economics Research Unit is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. The views expressed in the paper reflect those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders.Acknowledgements: Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Matt Sutton, conference participants at HESG 2017, Nordic HESG 2017, Health Studies User Conference 2018 and seminar participants at University of Wollongong for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Core funding from the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors only and not those of the funding bodies.
Data Availability Statement
Data availability: The ELSA data that support the findings of this study are available from the UK data service.Keywords
- retirement
- health behaviour
- healthy lifestyles
- retirement externalities
- partners