bobcat2 wrote: ↑Sat May 15, 2021 10:09 am
Do Men Who Work Longer Live Longer? Evidence from the Netherlands - by Alice Zulkarnain and Matthew S. Rutledge
Key findings
-
Working longer is a powerful way to improve retirement security, and some suggest it also improves health.
- But does working longer improve health or does good health lead to working longer?
- A temporary tax policy change in the Netherlands that encouraged some older workers to stay in the labor force longer provides a natural experiment.
- The experiment confirms that working longer causes better health – specifically longer life expectancy.
- Men ages 62-65 who worked longer due to the policy change saw a two-month increase in life expectancy during their late 60s.
- This improvement could be more substantial if the impact is longer lasting.
Conclusion
As countries move to encourage later retirement, one crucial piece of information is still uncertain: whether working longer improves mortality. The simple correlation between working and mortality does suggest a relationship, but it does not imply that work is causing the better outcomes. To estimate this causal effect, the analysis takes advantage of a Dutch tax policy change.
The results indicate that Dutch men ages 62-65 induced to work by the policy change do live longer: their mortality falls at a rate that implies at least two extra months of longevity, and up to two years if the effect is longer lasting.
These results require some caveats. First, the causal estimates relate to the people who responded to the tax policy by working longer, and may not apply to everyone who worked longer. Second, the tax policy takes a “carrot” approach, offering incentives to work longer, rather than the “stick” approach of some U.S. proposals that aim to discourage early retirement by reducing benefits; it is unclear whether a penalty would be more or less effective than a bonus such as the DWB. Nonetheless, these results indicate that encouraging some people to work longer may result in longer lives.
Co-authors Zulkarnain and Rutledge are research economists at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Link to policy brief -
https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2 ... B-21-8.pdf
Link to working paper -
https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2 ... 018-11.pdf
BobK
They use diabetes and depression to attempt to account for health.
“The paper focuses on 5-year mortality rates, but also examines less acute health measures; because of the data lack information on actual medical diagnoses, the analysis uses information on prescription drug utilization tied to two specific conditions affecting mental and physical health – depression and diabetes.
…
For less acute measures of health, the study will focus on one psychological and one physical health condition: 1) depression; and 2) diabetes, using prescription drug data available from 2006 through 2016. These two conditions were chosen because they could be mapped to prescription drug classes as recorded by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) Classification System more directly than most other conditions.11”
Translation: we lost our keys over there but we’re looking here because the light is better.
The Netherlands is ranked 142 for incidence of diabetes.
https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indica ... S/rankings
The US is 43.
While diabetes is a risk factor for circulatory diseases it would have been better to track drugs for those diseases instead.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/520 ... -of-death/
Well managed diabetes isn’t generally debilitating until an older age. It runs in my family so we’re aware of the consequences.
Also note:
“ The first, Bloemenet al. (2017), exploit an early retirement opportunity among civil service workers in their 50s in the Netherlands (in contrast to the DWB, which affects a broader group of workers across sectors). The study finds that
early retirement decreased the affected group’s 5-year mortality rate by 2.6 percentage points – an extremely large decrease given 5-year mortality was only about 3-4 percent at those ages in the first place. The second study, Kuhn et al. (2010), finds that blue- collar workers in Austria who were given an early retirement opportunity in their early 60s experienced an increase in the probability of dying before the age of 67 of 2.4 percentage points per year of early retirement. In other words, these papers found effects in the opposite directions.2”
This study is no more definitive than those studies.
You are probably much better off to save 15% of gross over time, retire at 62 rather than 70 and join a gym rather than work longer.