1,721,016 research outputs found
Health and Labor Supply Dynamics of Older Married Workers
No full textThis empirical analysis investigates how the labor supply dynamics of married workers aged 46-65 is influenced by their own health conditions and by those of their cohabiting partners. Exploiting the information conveyed by the European Community Household Panel (1995-2001), our econometric specifications focus on the transition towards not employment within the next year and use alternative health indicators to describe the overall physical and mental conditions of couple members. We also control for partners labor supply because of its close relationship with their own health and the well-documented coordination with the labor market position of the other couple member. Our results show that while healthier individuals present higher chances of remaining at work in the future, living with healthier spouses affects positively the likelihood of ceasing from work. Finally, when the spouse is employed, the probability of keeping on working is estimated to rise. This last result upholds the hypothesis, suggested by the literature, that couple members prefer to spend their time in the same employment status
Estimating the Labor Supply Dynamics of Older Workers Using Repeated Cross-sections
No full textThe empirical analysis in this paper adopts logit models to study the hazard rate of ceasing from work by the next year for Italian older employees. The specifications are estimated resorting to the framework proposed by Guell and Hu (2006), which extracts information from repeated independent cross-sections to recover the hazard rate of interest at the individual level. The sample is drawn from the ISTAT survey Aspects of Everyday Life and includes employees aged 50-65 in 1993-2002. Our results show that, even conditioning on a wide set of socioeconomic factors, the age profile of the hazard rate is increasing and confirms the low labor market attachment of older workers. Further, the time evolution of the risk of becoming not employed appears to be hump-shaped and achieves its maximum for the cohorts of employees at work in the period 1996-1998, which is characterized by the introduction of important changes in the Social Security system aimed at extending the working life of the elderly
Essays on the Labor Supply Dynamics of Older Workers
Full text linkThe European Union laid out the Lisbon agenda in order to become "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion".
The fulfillment of this ambition should not discard the introduction of policies enhancing the economic participation of the elderly. In fact, lower fertility rates and increasing life expectancy have triggered the aging process of European population and are deeply altering its demographic structure.
An aging society may exert larger pressure on the financial sustainability of pay-as-you-go pension systems owing to the decreasing age-profile of employment rates. On the one hand, the revenues coming from workers contributions to the scheme are expected to fall because a smaller fraction of individuals will be at work. On the other hand, the overall pension burden is expected to increase because a rising proportion of the population will be eligible for pension benefits.
In view of these considerations, European Union fosters Social Security reforms which assure long-run financial equilibrium and fully take into account the ongoing demographic modifications. At the same time, such institutional changes should be accompanied by public programs aimed at extending the working life of the elderly. Indeed, stimulating the labor market participation of older workers is an ulterior strategy to alleviate the financial burden of Social Security because many of them who no longer find profitable the permanence in the labor market are likely to apply for retirement benefits.
The development of policies aimed at achieving these purposes requires the support of analyses examining the labor supply dynamics of older workers. Throughout the thesis we will focus on transitions out of employment by considering elderly individuals at work in a given time period and describing their probability of becoming not employed in the future.
In line with Blau (1994), we opt to estimate the dynamics of labor market position rather than imposing some arbitrary definition of retirement because the exit from the labor force may occur following alternative paths, such as becoming labor pensioners at the end of a full time job or starting an unemployment spell due to firm-downsizings that turn out to be a bridge towards ad-hoc early retirement arrangements. In order to preserve such heterogeneity, in this study workers are allowed to leave employment for whatever reason and to perform any possible employment trajectory.
Chapter 1 studies the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills on the probability of ceasing from work. The point at issue is of particular interest because the Lisbon agreements place the improvement and the diffusion of ICT knowledge among the priorities of the Union. Our work draws data from the waves 2000-2004 of the Bank of Italy Survey on Household's Income and Wealth. Remarkably, the questionnaire of the 2000 survey provides unique information to measure ICT knowledge at the individual level. In fact, respondents are asked to report the utilization of a PC at work and to rank their computer literacy according to a predefined scale. This distinction is useful to disentangle the effects of actual individual investments in ICT training from those due to implicit job requirements reflecting firm organization. The econometric specifications adopted allow for the potential endogeneity of technological knowledge in a labor supply framework. In fact, older individuals who plan to work longer may be more willing to enhance their skills as they face a longer period over which training costs can be recouped. Improvements in ICT skills are estimated to produce a positive effect on employment chances only for males with high education. This pattern corroborates the hypothesis of complementarity between educational attainments and technological knowledge (Weinberg, 2004).
The literature provides a huge amount of evidence suggesting a positive relationship between individuals health and their own employment chances. Instead, few studies consider the role of the health conditions of other household members in the determination of the opportunity cost of keeping on working. Chapter 2 explores this research area by investigating how the labor supply dynamics of married workers is influenced by their own health conditions and by those of their cohabiting partners. Exploiting the European Community Household Panel (1995-2001), the overall psychophysical well-being of individuals is described by means of alternative indicators based on either self-assessments or more objective health indexes. Partners employment conditions are included among the explanatory factors because of their close relationship with health and the well-documented coordination between the labor market positions of couple members (Michaud, 2003). We also control for different sources of heterogeneity that may arise in our set-up and prevent us to estimate consistently the causal effects of interest. Our results confirm that healthier individuals are more prone to keep on working and, on the contrary, suggest that those living with a spouse in poor health are characterized by a higher propensity towards leaving employment.
Finally, Chapter 3 deals with the study of labor market transitions when the use of panel datasets involves a number of major complications, for instance due to severe attrition, small sample size, short time-span covered or lack of relevant variables. Following the approach proposed in Güell and Hu (2006), we estimate the individual hazard rate of stopping working only resorting to repeated independent cross-sections representative of the same population. Although workers are not observed over time, we are still able to evaluate their own likelihood of becoming not employed by combining the labor market outcomes experimented in different time periods by individuals of the same birth-cohort. Drawing data from the ISTAT survey Aspetti della Vita Quotidiana (1993-2003), we recover the evolution of the risk of leaving employment in a period characterized by several pension system reforms. We propose evidence that while the Amato (1995) and Prodi (1997) reforms passed, the cohorts of older workers at time show the highest hazard rate of leaving employment. On the contrary, their counterparts in 2001 and 2002 are more likely to prolong their working life. These findings suggest that, in the short run, repeated institutional changes designed to lower the Social Security generosity actually induce an increase in the exit rate from the labor force
Dispositional optimism and stock investments
Full text linkThis paper analyses the relationship between dispositional optimism and stock investments. Data are drawn from the second wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Dispositional optimism is found to be a relevant predictor of the ownership of stocks as well as of the share of gross financial wealth invested in this asset. The role of dispositional optimism is found to be stronger for risk tolerant agents and its relationship with the share of wealth invested in stocks varies with agents’ trust
Does retirement reduce familiarity with Information and Communication Technology?
Full text linkThis paper analyses the effect of retirement on the familiarity with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) of older individuals. We argue that inability to cope with ICT might represent a threat for older individuals’ social inclusion. To account for the potential endogeneity of retirement with respect to familiarity with ICT, we instrument retirement decision with the age-eligibility for early and statutory retirement pension schemes. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we show that retirement reduces the computer literacy and the frequency of internet utilization for men and women. This finding is robust to the inclusion as control factors of health, cognition and social network indicators, which the literature has shown to be affected by retirement. Overall, the reduction in the familiarity with ICT after retirement tends to be stronger in the long-run
The effect of work disability on the job involvement of older workers
Full text linkThis paper analyzes the effect of work disability on the job involvement of workers aged 50–65 living in Europe. We elicit a measure of job involvement from a question asking respondents to think about their job and declare whether they would like to retire as early as they can. We exploit objective health indicators and anchoring vignettes to enhance the comparability across individuals of work disability self-assessments. Individuals’ evaluations of their health-related work limitations are found to be mildly affected by justification bias but to depend on individual heterogeneity in reporting behaviour. Work disability significantly reduces the job involvement of workers. After controlling for individual fixed-effects and an extensive set of time-varying covariates, moving from the first to the third quartile of the work disability distribution is associated with a 8% increase (4 percentage points) in the probability of desiring to retire as soon as possible. The effect is larger for blue-collar workers. Justification bias and heterogeneity in reporting behaviour do not alter the magnitude of these effects
Alternative weighting structures for multidimensional poverty assessment
No full textA multidimensional poverty assessment requires a weighting scheme to aggregate the well-being dimensions considered. We use Alkire and Foster’s J. Public Econ. 95, 476–487 (2011a) framework to discuss the channels through which a change of the weighting structure affects the outcomes of the analysis in terms of overall poverty assessment, its dimensional and subgroup decomposability and policy evaluation. We exploit the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to evaluate how alternative weighting structures affect the measurement of poverty for the population of over-50s in ten European countries. Further, we show that in our empirical exercise the results based on hedonic weights estimated on the basis of life satisfaction self-assessments are robust to the presence of heterogeneous response styles across respondents
Does retirement decrease the familiarity with ICT of older individuals?
Full text linkInability to cope with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) might represent a threat for older individuals’ social inclusion. This paper analyses the effect of retirement on the familiarity with ICT of older individuals. To account for the potential endogeneity of retirement with respect to ICT knowledge we instrument retirement decision with the age-eligibility for early and statutory retirement pension schemes. Using data from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe we show that retirement reduces the computer literacy and the frequency of internet utilization for men and women. This effect is heterogeneous for women with respect to their propensity to opt for early or statutory retirement schemes. The exit from the labour market does not reduce ICT familiarity for the former, but it does for the latter. The negative retirement effect on ICT knowledge is stronger for white-collar workers, whose occupations require a more intense use of these skills as compared with blue-collar jobs
Alternative weighting structures for multidimensional poverty assessment
No full textA multidimensional poverty assessment requires a weighting scheme to aggregate the well-being dimensions considered. We use Alkire and Foster’s (2011a) framework to discuss the channels through which a change of the weighting structure affects the outcomes of the analysis in terms of overall poverty assessment, its dimensional and subgroup decomposability and policy evaluation. We exploit the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to evaluate how alternative weighting structures affect the measurement of poverty for the population of over 50s in ten European countries. Further, we show that in our empirical exercise the results based on hedonic weights estimated on the basis of life satisfaction self-assessments are robust to the presence of heterogeneous response styles across respondents
The effect of work disability on the intention to retire of older workers
Full text linkIn this paper, we analyze the effect of work disability on the desire to retire as soon as possible of older workers. We exploit objective health indicators and anchoring vignettes to develop work disability measures enhancing the comparability across individuals of work disability self-assessments. Our results show that, even once controlling for individual fixed-effects, individuals experiencing work limiting health problems are found to have a stronger propensity to retire. The role of work disability in determining retirement intentions varies with earnings and job characteristics
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