Do Single Women Value Early Retirement more than Single Men?

The focus of this paper is to analyse why a large fraction of single elderly people choose to retire early. A structural model directly based on the individual decision of labour supply is estimated on a sample of singles, where singles are defined as those who are living alone. We find that income and health are important determinants of the retirement decision. Furthermore, we find substantial gender differences in the retirement pattern. Healthy single women value retirement more than healthy single men and are willing to reduce their disposable income to 74 per cent of their previous income while men are willing to reduce the income to 81 per cent. Men’s retirement decision is mainly influenced by income and health, whereas women’s retirement decision is also affected by education and unemployment experience.retirement; gender differences; singles; panel data; option value

Job Displacement and Health Outcomes: A Representative Panel Study

We investigate whether job loss as the result of displacement causes ill health. In doing this we use much better data than any previous investigators. Our data are a random 10% sample of the adult population of Denmark for the years 1981-1999. For this large representative panel we have very full records on demographics, health and work status for each person throughout the data period. As well as this we can link every person to a firm (if they are working) and can identify all workers who are displaced in any year, using a variety of definitions of displacement. We focus on one very precise health outcome, hospitalisation for stress related disease, since this is a grave condition and is widely thought to be likely to be associated with unemployment. We use the method of ‘matching on observables’ to estimate the counter-factual of what would have happened to the health of a particular group of displaced workers if they had not in fact been displaced. Our results indicate unequivocally that being displaced in Denmark does not cause hospitalisation for stress related disease. An analysis of the power of our test suggests that even though we are looking for a relatively rare outcome, our data set is large enough to show even quite small an effect if there were any. Supplementary analyses do not show any causal link from displacement or unemployment to our health outcomes for particular groups that might be thought to be more susceptible.unemployment; job displacement; health; matching on observables

Job Displacement and Health Outcomes: A Representative Panel Study ∗

We investigate whether job loss as the result of displacement causes ill health. In doing this we use much better data than any previous investigators. Our data are a random 10 % sample of the adult population of Denmark for the years 1981-1999. For this large representative panel we have very full records on demographics, health and work status for each person throughout the data period. As well as this we can link every person to a firm (if they are working) and can identify all workers who are displaced in any year, using a variety of definitions of displacement. We focus on one very precise health outcome, hospitalisation for stress related disease, since this is a grave condition and is widely thought to be likely to be associated with unemployment. We use the method of ‘matching on observables ’ to estimate the counter-factual of what would have happened to the health of a particular group of displaced workers if they had not in fact been displaced. Our results indicate unequivocally that being displaced does not cause hospitalisation for stress related disease. An analysis of the power of our test suggests that even though we are looking for a relatively rare outcome, our data set is large enough to show even quite small an effect if there were any. Supplementary analyses do not show any causal link from displacement or unemployment to ou