Pappa Ante Portas: The effect of the husband's retirement on the wife's mental health in Japan

The \u201cRetired Husband Syndrome\u201d, that affects the mental health of wives of retired men around the world, has been anecdotally documented but never formally investigated. Using Japanese micro-data and the exogenous variation across cohorts in the maximum age of guaranteed employment induced by a 2006 Japanese reform, we estimate that the husband's earlier retirement significantly increases the probability that the wife reports symptoms related to the syndrome. We also find that retirement has a negative effect both on the household's economic situation and on the husband's own mental health, and that the higher economic distress contributes to reducing the wife's mental health

Does Postponing Minimum Retirement Age Improve Healthy Behaviours Before Retirement? Evidence from Middle-Aged Italian Workers.

By increasing the residual working horizon of employed individuals, pension reforms that rise minimum retirement age can affect individual investment in health-promoting behaviors before retirement. Using the expected increase in minimum retirement age induced by a 2004 Italian pension reform and a difference-in-differences research design, we show that middle-aged Italian males affected by the reform reacted to the longer working horizon by increasing regular exercise, with positive consequences for obesity and self-reported satisfaction with health

Pappa Ante Portas: The Retired Husband Syndrome in Japan

The "Retired Husband Syndrome", that affects the mental health of wives of retired men around the world, has been anecdotally documented but never formally investigated. We use Japanese micro data and the exogenous variation generated by the 2006 revision of the Japanese Elderly Employment Stabilization Law, which mandated employers to guarantee continuous employment between mandatory retirement age and full pension eligibility age, to estimate the causal effect of the husband's retirement on the wife's mental health. We find that adding one year to the time spent in retirement by Japanese husbands increases the probability that their wives develop the syndrome by 5.8 to 13.7 percentage points, depending on the empirical specification. We discuss mechanisms at work and argue that ceteris paribus increasing female labour force participation might exacerbate rather than attenuate the phenomenon

Does Delayed Retirement Affect Youth Employment? Evidence from Italian Local Labour Markets

Pension reforms that raise minimum retirement age increase the pool of senior individuals aged 50+ who are not eligible to retire from the labour market. Using data from Italian provinces and regions and an instrumental variable strategy, we estimate the effects of local changes in the supply of workers aged between 50 and minimum retirement age on youth, prime age and senior employment. Results based on provincial data from 2004 to 2015, a period characterized by declining real GDP, indicate that adding one thousand additional senior individuals to the local labour supply reduces employment in the age group 16-34 by 189 units. Estimates based on longer regional data covering the period 1996 to 2015, that includes also a period of growing real GDP, show smaller negative effects for young workers, suggesting that the employment costs of pension reforms may be lower when the economy is growing

Life satisfaction and endogenous aspirations

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (N = 13,145), we investigate the effects of (not) achieving aspirations on subjective well-being. We match individual-level data about life satisfaction aspirations with their subsequent realizations and we jointly estimate two panel-data equations, the first depicting the effects that (not) achieving initial aspirations exerts on the subsequent level of life satisfaction, and the second describing the endogenous adjustment process followed by aspirations as a function of beaten and unmet targets. We find that while achieving aspirations exerts weak effects on life satisfaction, failing to match aspired conditions significantly reduces subsequent realizations of life satisfaction. Moreover, our analysis supports a "hedonic adaptation" explanation of the previous results, as we find that aspirations significantly adjust to beaten targets, while they remain almost unchanged in case of unmet targets

Laterborns Don't Give Up: The Effects of Birth Order on Earnings in Europe

While it is well known that birth order affects educational attainment, less is known about its effects on earnings. Using data from eleven European countries for males born between 1935 and 1956, we show that firstborns enjoy on average a 13.7 percent premium over laterborns in their wage at labour market entry. However, this advantage is short lived, and disappears by age 30, between 10 and 15 years after labour market entry. While firstborns start with a better match, partly because of their higher education, laterborns quickly catch up by switching earlier and more frequently to better paying jobs. We argue that a key factor driving our findings is that laterborns are more likely to engage in risky behaviours

Training during recessions: recent European evidence

Abstract We use European Union Labour Force Survey data for the period 2005–2018 to investigate the cyclicality of training in Europe. Consistent with the view that firms use recessions as times to update skills, we find that training participation is moderately countercyclical for the employed. Within the not-employed group, this is true also for the unemployed, who are likely to be involved in public training programs during recessions, but not for the inactive, who may be affected by liquidity constraints

What’s in a name? Expectations, heuristics and choice during a period of radical school reform

Education policy worldwide has sought to incentivize school improvement and facilitate pupil-school matching by introducing reforms that promote autonomy and choice. Understanding the way in which families form preferences during these periods of reform is crucial for evaluating the impact of such policies. We study the effects on choice of a recent shock to the English school system – the academy programme – which gave existing state schools greater autonomy, but provided limited information on possible expected benefits. We use administrative data on school applications for three cohorts of students to estimate whether academy conversion changes schools’ popularity. We find that families – particularly non-poor, White British ones – rank converted schools higher on average. Expected changes in composition, effectiveness and other school policies cannot explain this updating of preferences. Instead, the patterns suggest that families combine the signal of conversion with prior information on quality, popularity and proximity as a heuristic for assessing a school’s expected future performance

Does mental productivity decline with age? Evidence from chess players

We use data on international chess tournaments to study the relationship between age and mental productivity in a brain-intensive profession. We show that less talented players tend to leave the game in the earliest phases of their career. When the effects of age on productivity vary with unobserved ability, commonly used fixed effects estimators applied to raw data do not guarantee consistent estimates of age-productivity profiles. In our data, this method strongly over-estimates the productivity of older players. We apply fixed effects to first-differenced data and show that productivity peaks in the early forties and smoothly declines thereafter. Because of this, players aged 60 are 11 percent less productive than players in their early forties