Is retirement bad for health? A matching approach

The aim of this paper is to assess the causal impact of the transition from work to retirement on individual health in various European countries in recent years. The health effects of this transition are far from clear: the specialized literature reports both positive and negative consequences, however, most of the early studies focus on associations rather than causal relationships. We estimate causal effects of retirement on three measures of health and well-being – self-rated health, depression, quality of life – using a propensity score matching approach under the assumption of selection on observables on data coming from SHARE, the longitudinal Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, in the years between 2004 and 2016. Our results suggest that the transition from work to retirement negatively affect self-rated health almost everywhere in Europe; nevertheless, the quality of life seems to improve, especially in Continental and Mediterranean countries.