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The relationship between retirement and mortality is studied with a unique administrative data set covering the full population of Norway. A series of retirement policy changes in Norway reduced the retirement age for a group of workers but not for others. Difference-in-differences estimation based on monthly birth cohorts and treatment group status show that the early retirement programme significantly reduced the retirement age; this holds true also when we account for programme substitution, for example into the disability pension. Instrumental variables estimation results show no effect on mortality of retirement age; neither do estimation results from a hazard rate model.

Is there a causal link, positive or negative, from retirement age to mortality? Leaving employment may involve reduced stress and greater enjoyment of life, suggesting that early retirement enhances longevity. However, it may also lead to reduced mental and physical activity, loss of social networks, and health-adverse habits, suggesting that later retirement may extend expected lifespan. Increasing life expectancy, especially at older ages, is imparting a new urgency to this question. Many OECD countries, looking ahead to the burgeoning fiscal burden of social security entitlements, have responded to increasing longevity by raising the statutory pension age; others have announced future increases (OECD, 2011). To the extent that pension access age influences actual retirement age, economic assessment of these policy reforms requires evidence about whether, how, and to what extent such changes affect life expectancy. While many papers address the relationship between retirement and mortality, the existing literature has thus far not succeeded in providing definitive guidance on its nature. This is primarily because health status influences both the timing of retirement and mortality. While early retirement may influence longevity, poor health may both induce a worker to retire and lead to an earlier death. Controlling for the ensuing selection bias is difficult, and until recently, attempts to do so have been unconvincing. Moreover, data sources vary in their time span and reliability, and data records sometimes do not extend to late ages. Recently, however, a number of studies have adopted approaches which take seriously the endogeneity of health status and retirement; policy changes such as differential retirement ages by cohort, region or industry have been enlisted as instruments. However, since involuntary retirement may also occur in early retirement programmes, it is important to separate the potential effect of an early retirement programme as such – which should be related to the voluminous literature on the effects of job-loss – from the potential effect of a change in the retirement age. In order to isolate the effect of the retirement age on mortality we require exogenous variation in the (entitled) retirement age conditional on participation in an early retirement programme, compared with a group facing no such change, to capture time trends. This paper combines such a research design with a unique administrative data set covering the entire population of Norway from 1992 to 2010. The data include highly reliable information on earnings, pension and labour market status as well as demographic information, such as birth and mortality dates, gender, education, and marital status. Between 1989 and 1998, Norway progressively introduced an early retirement scheme for some employers, while for others; the official retirement age remained at 67. We use this gradual and differential change in policy to investigate whether the early retirement opportunity generated significant differences in mortality between the groups, using an approach based on instrumental variables (IV) and difference-in-differences. Focusing on the cohorts born between 1928 and 1938 we construct a treatment group for which the entitled retirement age (ERA) fell from 65, via 64, 63 and finally to 62 years in 1998, and a control group for which the ERA remained 67 throughout. From this quasi-natural experiment we first study the impact of the fall in ERA on actual retirement age, ARA, defined as the age when a person was last observed working. Importantly, we take into account all forms of programme substitution, since early retirement may serve as a substitute for disability pension and other social insurance programmes. From this first-stage analysis we find, unsurprisingly, that lowering the entitled retirement age clearly and significantly reduces the actual retirement age. The mapping from entitled to actual retirement age is however well below one-to-one. Secondly, we study the impact of exogenous reductions in retirement age on mortality using the ERA as an instrumental variable for the ARA. Our data records mortality up to age 77 for some cohorts, well above most other studies in this field. We also decompose the data to perform separate analyses by gender, marital status, industry and education. Our instrumental variable estimates consistently fail to reject the null hypothesis of no causal effect of retirement age on mortality, despite a strong first stage and relatively precisely estimated coefficients. We also conduct several robustness and sensitivity tests, including different treatment group ERA-margins (65–64 and 64–62), employer fixed effects, and controls for whether or not the employer downsize (as indications of involuntary job loss), all of which support our main findings. As a final robustness check we estimate a triple difference estimator of the effect of retirement eligibility on mortality in a hazard rate model framework with flexible monthly mortality risk. The results of this exercise are well in line with our main results. The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 surveys some related empirical studies of the relationship between retirement age and mortality. Section 3 describes the institutional setting and the data. Section 4 presents the empirical strategy and discusses the identifying assumptions, before the main results are presented in Section 5 together with several tests for robustness. It also presents results from separate estimations on a number of subgroups. Results from the hazard rate model are presented in Section 6. Section 7 concludes.

In this paper we have investigated the potential impact of early retirement on mortality in a setting based on the gradual phase-in of an early retirement programme in Norway. The programme does not cover the entire labour force, and thereby provides a control group with pension eligibility age constant at 67. Among those covered the eligibility age was reduced in a step-wise manner; these reductions are used as an instrument for actual retirement age, to eliminate biases resulting from underlying variables like health status that may influence both retirement age and mortality. Detailed and reliable administrative register data allow observations of mortality up to age 70 for cohorts in which treatment group workers were exposed to eligibility ages ranging from 65 to 62. We have also studied mortality up to age 77 for a subset of cohorts for which the eligibility age of the treatment group varied between 65 and 64, but the sample size for this part of the analysis is considerably smaller. The data reveal a very clear association between retirement age and mortality, up to ages 67, 70, 74 and 77. However, instrumental variable estimation shows that this link is not a causal one: precise 2SLS estimates show that retirement age in itself has no significant effect on subsequent mortality. Estimates from a hazard rate model provide additional support for this result. Our results serve as an illustration of the importance of controlling for selection into early retirement, known in parts of the literature as the “healthy worker effect” (see e.g. Shim et al., 2010). The studies of mortality that have attempted to control for such selection by using information on health status have thus far ended up with varying results. This lack of consistent results in the existing literature is probably largely due to the difficulty in measuring all relevant health related factors that influence both retirement and mortality. In studies like ours, the approach is to control for selection either by comparison of groups that are similar except for different early retirement options or by constructing an instrumental variable for actual retirement age. Coe and Lindeboom (2008) find results very similar to ours, based on a sample with a similar range of retirement ages: the negative association between health and early retirement disappears when an early retirement “window” is used as an instrument for actual retirement. Our results stem from a setting in which the eligibility age was reduced, first from 67 to 65, then progressively from 65 to 62. While we find no impact on subsequent mortality from this variation, it might be that other retirement eligibility age ranges would have an impact. At even higher ages, there could be beneficial effects of retirement if work then becomes increasingly demanding, whereas a lower age range in combination with a perceived pressure to leave employment might have the opposite effect. This could be an explanation of the results of Kuhn et al. (2010), who find higher mortality among male early pensioners. The early retirement age in their sample is quite low (in the mid-fifties), and the circumstances around early retirement might indicate that many workers felt they were being pushed out of the labour market. In principle we cannot rule out that retirement age does impact mortality, even if we find no such effect. Yet, if we are to interpret the statistically insignificant coefficients we do obtain, it seems that if retirement age does affect mortality, then early retirement is more likely to lighten mortality than the reverse, at least for men. However, we reiterate that none of these effects are statistically significant and that such an effect can hardly be of any great importance. Our results are derived using data from a relatively generous welfare state, offering disability insurance (DI) to workers in bad health. We cannot rule out that the results would have been different in the absence of such an insurance system. We do believe, however, that if the presence of a DI system does affect our results, it so does by attenuating a reduction in mortality from early retirement. Overall, however, our results provide a clear message for policy. For an age range from the early 60s and upwards, arguably the most relevant age interval for policymakers, our results indicate that mortality considerations should not have a prominent place in policy discussions regarding retirement age.