Abstract
ObjectiveDespite a growing body of research, the effects of retirement on health are not clear. The study explores the role played by the path out of the labour market (formal retirement vs. unemployment or family reasons), accounting for individual heterogeneity. Methods: Propensity score matching approach is employed on longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (2004-2015). Results: While health does not change significantly for those who formally retire, it worsens considerably for those who leave the labour market for other reasons. Moreover, health outcomes turn out to be highly heterogeneous, depending on individual socio-economic and job-related characteristics. Discussion: Leaving the labour market in one's mature years is a complex transition. Future research should focus on understanding and combating the causes of premature exit from the labour market, a relevant concern both in economic terms and on health grounds, in the light of our results.
Highlights
Cultural distance is frequently cited as a potential source of problems: it complicates the management of multinational enterprises, reduces commercial exchanges, arouses sus‐ picion and sometimes hostility, and slows down the integration of foreigners in the host country, etc
(1) we illustrate its overall philosophy more clearly, (2) we show that treating ordinal scales as interval scales does not worsen, and arguably improves, the performance of the method (Sect. 4), and, perhaps most importantly, (3) we argue that, within limits, two of the critical choices of this method are less problematic than it may seem: in a large majority of the applications that we subjected to our sensitivity analysis (Sect. 7), results do not essentially change
If we focused only on the proportion belonging to cluster E (21%), we should come to the opposite conclusion
Summary
Cultural distance is frequently cited as a potential source of problems: it complicates the management of multinational enterprises, reduces commercial exchanges, arouses sus‐ picion and sometimes hostility, and slows down the integration of foreigners in the host country, etc. The second issue relates to the type of distance to be measured, distinguishing between what we will call here the collective and the individual approach The former, which is a far more widely accepted concept, relies on the idea of a ‘representative’ (e.g., average, or modal) value, such as national culture. We designed two checks based on our assumptions: the method needs to pass these tests to prove worthy of further consideration These are: Check (A) Italians (by macro-region of residence, of which we have five) should be culturally close to each other and more or less in geographical order, from North to South; Check (B) people of foreign origin but with an Italian citizenship should be cultur‐ ally closer to Italians (with Italian origin – Italians on) than foreigners are; As our method passes both checks (Section 5) we deem it reliable, and we use it to test the following hypotheses: Hy. Substantive and methodological conclusions are drawn in the eighth and final Section
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