Abstract
This paper presents a meta-analysis on the effects of retirement on health. We select academic papers published between 2000 and 2021 studying the impact of retirement on physical and mental health, self-assessed general health, healthcare utilization and mortality. Among 275 observations from 85 articles, 28% (13%) find positive (negative) effects of retirement on health outcomes. Almost 60% of the observations do not provide statistically significant findings. Using meta-regression analysis, we checked for the presence of publication bias after distinguishing among different journal subject areas and, once correcting for it, we find that the average effect of retirement on health outcomes is small and barely significant. We apply model averaging techniques to explore possible sources of heterogeneity and our results suggest that the different estimated effects can be explained by the differences in both health measurements and retirement schemes.
Highlights
In recent years, the attention to the effects of retirement on workers’ physical and mental health has grown considerably, becoming a topic of interest in the medical or psychological field, and among labour and health economists
To understand the relation between year of publication and study findings, we report in Table 2 the distribution of the absolute frequencies by year of publication divided in three groups and the research outcomes
In a first step, using a battery of meta-regression techniques, we checked for the presence of publication bias
Summary
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world’s largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author
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