Health and Labor Force Participation of the Elderly in Europe: What do Objective Health Measures Add to the Analysis?

In this paper, we study labour force participation behaviour of individuals aged 50-64 in 11 European countries.The data are drawn from the new Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).We examine the value added of objective health variables in relation to potentially endogenous self-reported health.We approach the endogeneity of self-reported health as an omitted variables problem.In line with the literature on the reliability of self-reported health, ambiguous results are obtained.In some countries, self-reported health does a fairly good job: controlling for extra health related variables does not seem to add much to the analysis.In other countries, however, self-reported health is clearly endogenous with results that are in line with the justi.cation hypothesis.They illustrate the multidimensional nature of health and the need to control for objective health variables when analyzing labour force participation behaviour.This makes an instrumental variables approach to deal with endogenous self-reported health less appropriate.SHARE;labour force participation;self-reported health;objective health;retirement

A Collective Retirement Model: Identification and Estimation in the Presence of Externalities

We study the labor supply dynamics of elderly couples by means of a structural collective model.The model allows for general externalities with respect to spouses leisure.Preferences and the intrahousehold bargaining process are identified by using panel data with couples and individuals who turned into widow(er)hood in the covered period.The model does not only look at the extensive margin (working versus being retired), but also at the intensive margin (how many hours are worked) and the claiming decision for social security benefits.We apply the model to American households coming from the first five waves of the Health and Retirement Study.We also provide model simulations for two widely discussed reform proposals; more specifically the abolition of the earnings test and the elimination of the spouse benefit.The model simulations reveal only small changes in labor supply of elderly couples.household economics;labour supply;social security;retirement;estimation;externalities

Labour Force Participation of the Elderly in Europe: The Importance of Being Healthy

In this paper we study labour force participation behaviour of individuals aged 50-64 in 11 European countries.The data are drawn from the new Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).The empirical analysis shows that health is multi-dimensional, in the sense that different health indicators have their own significant impact on individuals' participation decisions.Health effects differ markedly between countries.A counterfactual exercise shows that improved health conditions may yield over 10 percentage points higher participation rates for men in countries like Austria, Germany and Spain, and for females in the Netherlands and Sweden.Moreover, we show that the declining health condition with age accounts considerably for the decline in participation rates with age.SHARE;labour force participation;health;retirement

Nonparametric Analysis of Household Labor Supply: Goodness-of-Fit and Power of the Unitary and the Collective Model

We compare the empirical performance of unitary and collective labor supply models, using representative data from the Dutch DNB Household Survey.We conduct a nonparametric analysis that avoids the distortive impact of an erroneously speci.ed functional form for the prefer-ences and/or the intrahousehold bargaining process.Our analysis focuses on the goodness-of-.t of the two behavioral models.To guarantee a fair comparison, we complement this goodness-of-.t analysis with a power analysis.Our results strongly favor the collective approach to modeling the behavior of multi-person householdslabor supply;collective model;unitary model;nonparametric analysis;revealed preferences

Ranking Dutch Economists

This paper ranks Dutch economists using information about publications and citations. Rankings involve the aggregation of several performance dimensions. Instead of using a cardinal approach, where each dimension is weighted based on impact factors of journals for example, we use an ordinal approach which accounts for quality differences between journals and also takes citations into account. We find that this ordinal approach is more robust. Based on the ordinal ranking of publications and citations we find that Peter Wakker is the most productive economist, followed by Michel Wedel. The third place in the ranking is ex aequo for Philip-Hans Franses and Florencio Lopez de Silanes. Adding-up the individual output we find that the economists of Erasmus University Rotterdam are the most productive, followed ex aequo by Tilburg University and Free University Amsterdam.Productivity of economists;ranking