The effect of retirement on health and mortality in the United States

This paper studies the effect of retirement on health and mortality. In response to increased longevity and tighter public budget constraints, the general trend in developed countries is for Social Security systems to be modified to encourage people to remain in the labor force longer. In this paper, I study the 1983 reforms to the United States Social Security System that raised the retirement age for cohorts born after 1937 to estimate the causal effect of retirement on health and mortality. Combining IV and DID methods, I find that retirement has a positive effect on self-reported bad health and decreases the probability of experiencing limitations in daily activities for men. However, retirement increases the mortality rate by 0.46% for men and 1.4% for women. Heart disease contributes most to the effect on mortality. The different effects on health and mortality point to heterogeneous effects.