Aging, health and labour market participation

The last working paper is "Sysselsettingseffekter av pensjonsreformen med hensyn til helsetilstand" (Arild Aakvik, Egil Kjerstad, Karin Monstad, Tor Helge Holmås), where we analyze how the pension reform in 2011 affected the employment outcome and withdrawal of pension. The study addresses the issue of whether health determines the degree to which individuals respond to the economic incentives in the reform. Is it that poor health prevents individuals from making use of the fact that the reform made it considerably more profitable to stay in work for a long time? We find a clear effect of the pension reform on the likelihood of being employed for private sector employees with AFP. Here we are talking about effects in the order of 13 percentage points. When we divide the sample by health status, we find a marginal lower effect of the pension reform for those who have many doctor visits compared to those with no or few doctor visits, for individuals in the private sector with AFP. For people in the public sector and the private sector without AFP, the effects are generally small. The article is now being prepared for submission to the journal Samfunnsøkonomen. Otto Sevaldson Lillebø submitted his thesis for the PhD degree 31 October 2018. The thesis is called "Four essays on ageing, health and labour market participation". He will defend the thesis at the University of Bergen 22 February 2019. This thesis consists of five essays: An introductory essay and four essays within the topic of ageing, health and labour market participation. For more on all the research articles in the project, se Resultatrapport. Project web-page: http://rokkan.uni.no/sites/aging/

Hovedformålet med prosjektet er å studere sammenhenger mellom helse, arbeid og trygd blant eldre arbeidstakere. Alle våre analyser er politikkrelevante i forhold til pensjonsreformen i 2011 og betydningen av helse, og kan inngå som kunnskap for politikkutforming og forvaltning av det offentlig pensjonssystemet. Prosjektet har i sin helhet vært kvantitativ med data fra SSB. Vi kunne ikke gjennomført seriøse empiriske studier uten disse. Prosjektdeltakerne har opparbeidet seg en betydelig kompetanse i arbeid med registerdata og robuste forskningsmetoder. Prosjektet har også fått kontakt med internasjonale forskere på feltet. Vi arrangerte en internasjonal forskersamling i 2017, med deltakere fra Norge, Sverige, Nederland, Tyskland og England, og dette er et forskernettverk vi vil fortsette å bruke også etter prosjektslutt. Vi var også hos Nav Hordaland, med leger, psykologer, pedagoger og ledere i Nav Hordaland som tilhørere.

We will investigate the relationship between health and labour market participation for older individuals in Norway. The research is based on data from the FD-Trygd database, the Norwegian Patient Register (NPR) and HELFO. Due to reverse causality problems, analysing the relationship between labour market participation and health is challenging. We will identify causal effects by exploiting exogenous variation in health (health shocks) and in labour market conditions (various reforms). It is agreed upon in the economic literature that financial incentives are important for retirement decision. Less clear in the literature is the role of health for the labour supply decision at older ages. Our first objective is to analyse the effects of health on labour supply and early retirement for older employees. We will investigate three different issues: 1) The effect of health on retirement decisions. 2) The effect of health on pension uptake. 3) The effect of health shocks on the labour market participation for the spouse. Most OECD countries are currently undertaking measures to prolong the working careers of older workers. However, an important question - which has been largely overlooked by policy makers - concerns the effect of later retirement on individual well-being and, in particular, on health. Our second objective is to analyse how early retirement and reduced work load/working hours affects health. Here we will focus on the following issues: 1) How early retirement affects health. 2) Health effects of increased vacation. 3) Health effects of reduced work load.