...millions on welfare depend on you! No, wait, that's for another screed. This one is about early retirement leading to early death:
We find that a reduction in the retirement age causes a significant increase in the risk of premature death – defined as death before age 67 – for males but not for females. The effect for males is not only statistically significant but also quantitatively important. According to our estimates, one additional year of early retirement causes an increase in the risk of premature death of 2.4 percentage points (a relative increase of about 13.4%; or 1.8 months in terms of years of life lost).
This is consistent with the anecdotal evidence. But why?
We consider several channels to understand why male early retirees die earlier.4
- A first channel suggests that early exit from the labour market is associated with lower permanent income. We find that earnings losses due to early retirement cannot explain our finding for men, because these losses are quantitatively too small to have a substantial impact on mortality.
- A second channel suggests that changes in health-related behaviours associated with smoking, drinking, an unhealthy diet, and little physical exercise may cause premature death following early retirement. Our results strongly support this hypothesis. Complementary data from cause-of-death statistics reveal that excess mortality is concentrated on three causes of deaths:
- ischemic heart diseases (mostly heart attacks),
- diseases related to excessive alcohol consumption, and
- vehicle injuries.
These three causes of death account for 78% of the causal retirement effect (while accounting for only 24% of all deaths in the sample). We calculate that 32.4% of the causal retirement effect can be directly attributed to smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.
- A third channel suggests that the detrimental mortality effect arises from retirement following an involuntary job loss but not from voluntary quits. Even though our data do not distinguish between voluntary and involuntary retirement, we exploit severance payment rules to proxy the voluntariness of the retirement decision. Our empirical results suggest that retirement following an involuntary job loss is likely to cause excess mortality among blue-collar males, while retirement after a voluntary quit does not.
I can't quite fathom why the authors, who appear to be both intelligent and perceptive, failed to consider purposelessness as a contributing factor. A bodily organ which has no function tends to wither away: first to vestigial status, and over time, to disappearance. Why would this effect not apply to the whole body?
Of course, the authors are principally concerned with government budget stresses, which suggests that their agenda isn't entirely benign. I mean, all those folks on welfare are purposeless, too...but I did say I'd save that for another screed, didn't I?
3 comments:
Indeed, Fran - my first thought was about purposelessness - is it not a well-known trope that men are emotionally tied to their jobs (as women are to their various social networks)?
If you've spent the last 10 or 20 years working at a job, and then suddenly had nothing to spend your energies on, it seems an easy cue for depression, which I would guess is far more likely to go unnoticed in those circumstances than most others, leading many to lose the will to keep going.
David beat me to my comment, so I'll only add:
Think how much this will save in Social Security and Medicaid payments...
I've always thought that retirement was the leading cause of death in men.
One a man loses his need or drive to do something, it's but a short walk to his final rest.
The lesson to me is - keep doing something.
(One of my sensei's is 84 and he's fitter than most 40 year olds that I know - and he does what he loves. There is a lesson there, I think.)
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