Consequences of Retirement on Health, Mortality, and Family

ABSTRACT The current dissertation centers on the pressing social problems generated by population aging. Over the course of the 20th century, high-income nations have achieved significant extensions of life expectancies. As a result, retirement has become a common life event. Given that retirement is accompanied by major changes in daily activities, exposures, and social integrations that may affect health and well-being, retirement can be a life event that determines trajectories in these domains among older people. Chapter 1 asks whether retirement makes people (biologically) older. Prior works examining effects of retirement on age-related health issues often used a question asking whether respondents suffer from or were diagnosed with age-related diseases. However, such measurements may not allow researchers to adequately capture physiological consequences of retirement unless older people perceive disease conditions and visit medical doctors to get diagnosed in a timely manner. Alternatively, this chapter uses biological age—an indicator of progressive deterioration of physiological function along with chronological aging. Because biological age captures physiological changes preceding disease onset, the use of biological age measure may uncover health consequences of retirement, which could not be observed with doctor’s diagnosis-based age-related disease measures. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD), I find that retirement makes people biologically older. This finding is situated to the emerging scientific discussion about direct interventions to biological age to achieve additional improvements in population health and life expectancy. Chapter 2 revisits the non-significant mortality effect of retirement. Prior works implicitly or explicitly assumed that retirement affects one’s mortality risk instantaneously upon retirement. Nonetheless, drawing on the cumulative process perspective in life course research, viii the mortality effect of retirement may not be present shortly after retirement but can gradually compound over time. To capture the cumulative mortality effect of retirement, I used a fuzzy regression kink design to identify effects of retirement duration on the risk of mortality. While I find no evidence for a sudden jump in mortality risk at retirement, results show that retirement cumulatively increases mortality risk as one stays retired, suggesting the accumulation of inequality in mortality risk between retirees and non-retirees over the life course. Chapter 3 applies the idea to estimate health effects of retirement to divorce. Work status has been taking a core role in theoretical frameworks to explain causes of divorce. However, scholarly efforts have not systematically expanded to an investigation of the relationship between retirement and divorce because it was expected that marital status at later life is stable. Nonetheless, with a sharp rise of gray divorce—a divorce involving people aged 50 or above—marriage has become less stable than in the past. Sociologists have demonstrated a non-significant association between retirement and gray divorce, but this does not indicate the absence of effect of retirement on the risk of divorce. Using a fuzzy RDD, I find that retirement stabilizes marriage, particularly for males and those in younger birth cohorts.