Abstract
Against the backdrop of an aging global population and the increasing pressure of medical care expenditures for seniors, this paper used a fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) model to explore the effects of retirement on the self-assessed health and objective physical and mental health of older people. Using survey data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), our model addresses some relevant academic controversies. Our sample was comprised of male respondents from government agencies, enterprises, and public institutions. The research explored the impact of retirement on lifestyle habits and included an in-depth analysis of the mechanism through which retirement influences different aspects of health. The results show that: (1) Retirement does not have any significant impact on objective health, including depression and self-care ability, but it does cause a notable decline in subjective health assessment. (2) Retirement shortened the sleep time of respondents, which may account for lower scores on subjective health self-evaluations, but it did not lead to any noticeable improvement in habits which are harmful to health, such as smoking and drinking. (3) Marriage can help alleviate the problems of depression and smoking among older people, and education has a somewhat broader positive effect on their health and lifestyles; however, neither factor helps to improve the sleep problems of older people. Therefore, this paper recommends that efforts should be made to both optimize retirement policies and seek further ways to improve the health of the retired population.
Highlights
This study will seek to address the following three questions that have emerged from previous research: (1) What impact does China’s existing retirement policy have on its citizens’ health? This study looks at not just how retirement affects Chinese retirees’ objective health, and how it affects their subjective health
Using data from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we evaluated the self-assessed health and the objective health of older people, including depression and self-care ability, and employed an fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) model to assess the effects of retirement on different aspects of wellbeing
Based on the research results of the relationship between retirement and subjective health, we suggest that less sleep is not an intrinsically motivated choice on the part of older people but may be a result of sub-health problems like insomnia, which indirectly explains the reason for lower Self-assessed Health (SAH) scores
Summary
A country or a region is considered to have an aging society if people over age 60 account for at least 10% of its population or if those over age 65 constitute 7% of the population (Zhang et al, 2021). We selected male respondents from government agencies, enterprises, and public institutions Such a sampling method facilitates the quasi-natural experiment of this study using the policies on compulsory retirement and the regression discontinuity-based recognition of the causal relationship between retirement and health. It is generally perceived that retirement is good for health, since, from the perspective of objective health, retirees usually do not have heavy physical and/or mental workloads (Mazzonna and Peracchi, 2017), are able to enjoy more leisure time and opportunities to exercise, and experience less pressure (Latif, 2013; Kämpfen and Maurer, 2016; Jones et al, 2018) Given these benefits, increasing the retirement age would not reduce pressure on social security systems or increase labor supply. It would seem feasible to alleviate labor shortage problems and current rising medical care expenditures by raising retirement ages (Behncke, 2012)
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