Is Retirement Depressing?: Labor Force Inactivity and Psychological Well-Being in Later Life

Kerwin Kofi Charles

No 9033, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper assesses how retirement - defined as permanent labor force non-participation in a man's mature years - affects psychological welfare. The raw correlation between retirement and well-being is negative. But this does not imply causation. In particular, people with idiosyncratically low well-being, or people facing transitory shocks which adversely affect well-being might disproportionately select into retirement. Discontinuous retirement incentives in the Social Security System, and changes in laws affecting mandatory retirement and Social Security benefits allows the exogenous effect of retirement on happiness to be estimated. The paper finds that the direct effect of retirement on well-being is positive once the fact that retirement and well being are simultaneously determined is accounted for.

JEL-codes: I31 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (52)

Published as Charles, Kerwin Kofi. “Is Retirement Depressing?: Labor Force Inactivity and Psychological Well Being in Later Life." Research in Labor Economics 23 (2004): 269-299.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9033.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9033

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9033

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().