scholarly journals RETIREMENT TIMING AND POST-RETIREMENT HEALTH: QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM DENMARK

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S902-S902
Author(s):  
Jeevitha Y Qvist

Abstract A growing concern among policy makers in the European welfare states is that the proportion of the population in the working age has decreased over the last decades. In response to these demographic trends, many European countries have introduced reforms that roll back welfare policies that enables early retirement in order to sustain the current standards of living. However, scholars have voiced the concern that reforms which prevent early retirement could cause a rise in health inequality in old age because some people are not able to extend their working life. There are two contradictory views on post-retirement health. Retirement can either be seen as a kind of identity crisis, leading to less motivation to maintain health or retirement can be seen as a health preserving transition, enabling individuals to relieve stress and be more aware of their health. So far, empirical evidence on the effect of retirement timing on post-retirement health is inconclusive about the causal nature of this relationship. To estimate the causal effect of retirement timing on post-retirement health, this paper uses month of birth variation in incentives to postpone early retirement in the cohort born in 1939 that was created by a reform of the Danish retirement legislation, which the government introduced in 1999. The results suggest that people who retire at the age of 60 have more adverse health outcomes in old age than people who retire later, but this difference does not appear to be caused by differences in retirement timing.

Author(s):  
Nopphol Witvorapong ◽  
Yong Yoon ◽  
Wiraporn Pothisiri

Abstract Based on nationally representative data (N = 8,901), this study investigates the extent to which expectations for intra-family transfers and government assistance in old age impact the probability of saving for retirement among working-age individuals in Thailand. Results show that expectations for financial non-self-reliance and expectations that family support would constitute the most important source of old-age financial security reduce the probability that working-age individuals would save for retirement. Expectations for government support have no impact on average. Given that filial piety is weakening in Thailand, this study suggests that the government encourage pre-retirement savings more strongly.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S64-S65
Author(s):  
Emma Aguila ◽  
Jaqueline L Angel ◽  
Kyriakos Markides

Abstract The United States and Mexico differ greatly in the organization and financing of their old-age welfare states. They also differ politically and organizationally in government response at all levels to the needs of low-income and frail citizens. While both countries are aging rapidly, Mexico faces more serious challenges in old-age support that arise from a less developed old-age welfare state and economy. For Mexico, financial support and medical care for older low-income citizens are universal rights, however, limited fiscal resources for a large low-income population create inevitable competition among the old and the young alike. Although the United States has a more developed economy and well-developed Social Security and health care financing systems for the elderly, older Mexican-origin individuals in the U.S. do not necessarily benefit fully from these programs. These institutional and financial problems to aging are compounded in both countries by longer life spans, smaller families, as well as changing gender roles and cultural norms. In this interdisciplinary panel, the authors of five papers deal with the following topics: (1) an analysis of old age health and dependency conditions, the supply of aging and disability services, and related norms and policies, including the role of the government and the private sector; (2) a binational comparison of federal safety net programs for low-income elderly in U.S. and Mexico; (3) when strangers become family: the role of civil society in addressing the needs of aging populations; and (4) unmet needs for dementia care for Latinos in the Hispanic-EPESE.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
KATI KUITTO ◽  
JOAN E. MADIA ◽  
FEDERICO PODESTÀ

Abstract Pension adequacy is gaining importance as old-age poverty remains a pressing problem. In many advanced welfare states, the population is ageing rapidly and recent pension reforms have led to cuts in public pension provision. There are, however, few comparative longitudinal studies on the relationship between pension generosity and old-age poverty. This study provides a comparative empirical assessment of how the prevalence and depth of old-age poverty relates to generosity of public pension benefits in 14 advanced OECD welfare states from 1980-2010. We focus on the role of mandatory public pension provision of mainly first tier schemes that grant the major share of retirees’ income in most countries. We use data on theoretical pension replacement rates for retirees who had different working-age incomes. In order to address endogeneity issues, we adopt an instrumental-variable approach. Our main finding shows that pensions systems and earnings-related schemes, in particular, are quite efficient in reducing the risk of old-age poverty. Yet they still do very little to alleviate poverty among those pensioners in the most disadvantaged situations. We also found that redistribution within the pension system does not substantially contribute to poverty alleviation.


Author(s):  
Verena Seibel ◽  
Jeanette A J Renema

Abstract Public healthcare is still one of the main pillars of European welfare states, despite the increasing number of migrants, we know little about migrants’ attitudes toward healthcare. We used recent data from the MIFARE survey and compared natives with a variety of nine migrant groups living in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, focusing on migrants’ preferred level of governmental involvement and their satisfaction with public healthcare. We found that, compared to natives, migrants held the government less responsible for providing healthcare while expressing a higher level of satisfaction. Whereas health differences among migrants and natives did not explain this ethnic gap, we found that these ethnic gaps are moderated by socialization processes and knowledge of healthcare rights.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 7478
Author(s):  
Hyunjung Kim ◽  
Eun Jung Kim

Since the dawn of the 21st century, Japan has switched its national industry strategy from traditional industries—manufacturing and trading—toward tourism. Regional revitalization is a particularly important issue in Japan, and by uniting regions as an integrated tourism zone, the government expects an increase in visits to tourism zones. This study quantitatively evaluates whether the regions that contain a tourism zone experience a significant increase in visitors by using a quasi-experimental pretest–posttest control group design. Additionally, it examines the effects of subsidies through regression modeling. The results indicated that the tourism zones that were comprised of a narrow region in the same prefectures experienced a significant increase in visitors. The subsidy on information transmission, measures for the secondary traffic, and space formation had a significant positive impact on the increase in visitors to these tourism zones. Implications on tourism policies, urban and regional development, and community development can be obtained through this study.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110470
Author(s):  
Meng Le Zhang ◽  
George Galster ◽  
David Manley ◽  
Gwilym Pryce

Regeneration is an internationally popular policy for improving distressed neighbourhoods dominated by large social housing developments. Stimulating employment is often touted as a secondary benefit, but this claim has rarely been evaluated convincingly. In 2003, Glasgow City Council transferred ownership of its entire social housing stock to the Glasgow Housing Association and over £4 billion was invested in physical repairs, social services and other regeneration activities. Using a linked census database of individuals (Scottish Longitudinal Study), we evaluate the causal effect of the Stock Transfer on employment in Glasgow through a quasi-experimental design that exploits idiosyncrasies and changes in Glasgow’s administrative boundaries. We find that the Stock Transfer had a positive effect on employment for Glasgow residents who were not living in transferred social housing stock. We establish that this effect was mainly accomplished through the local employment multiplier effect of capital spending rather than through any other programmatic elements of the Stock Transfer. Exploratory analysis shows heterogeneous effects: individuals who were over 21, female, living with dependent children and with less education were less likely to benefit from the intervention. We did not find significant subgroup effects by neighbourhood deprivation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 658-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Romain Gauriot ◽  
Lionel Page

We provide evidence of a violation of the informativeness principle whereby lucky successes are overly rewarded. We isolate a quasi-experimental situation where the success of an agent is as good as random. To do so, we use high-quality data on football (soccer) matches and select shots on goal that landed on the goal posts. Using nonscoring shots, taken from a similar location on the pitch, as counterfactuals to scoring shots, we estimate the causal effect of a lucky success (goal) on the evaluation of the player's performance. We find clear evidence that luck is overly influencing managers' decisions and evaluators' ratings. Our results suggest that this phenomenon is likely to be widespread in economic organizations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelia Betsch ◽  
Nora Katharina Küpke ◽  
Leonie Otten ◽  
Eckart von Hirschhausen

Increasing people’s willingness to donate organs after their death requires effective communication strategies. In two preregistered studies, we assessed whether humorous entertainment education formats on organ donation elicit positive effects on knowledge, fears, attitudes, and behavioral intentions – both immediately after the treatment and four weeks later. We test whether perceived funniness mediates expected effects on attitudes and intentions. Study 1 is a quasi-experiment which uses a live medical comedy show (N = 3,964) as an entertainment education format, which either contained or did not contain information about organ donation. Study 2, a lab experiment, tests humor’s causal effect in a pre-post design with a control group (N = 144) in which the same content was provided in either a humorous or non-humorous way in an audio podcast. Results showed that humorous interventions per se were not more effective than neutral information, but that informing people about organ donation in general increased donation intentions, attitudes, and knowledge. However, humorous interventions were especially effective in reducing fears related to organ donation. The findings are discussed regarding the opportunities for sensitive health communication through entertainment education formats, psychological processes that humor triggers, and humor’s role in health communication formats.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Funda Ustek-Spilda ◽  
Marja Alastalo

As James Scott writes, to be able to govern, administrative bodies need to make objects of government legible. Yet migrant persons do not fall neatly into the categories of administrative agencies. This categorical ambiguity is illustrated in the tendency to exclude asylum seekers from various population registers and to not provide them with ID numbers, which constitute the backbone of many welfare states in Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and Finland, and in Eurostat and UNECE, we study how practices of population registration and statistics compilation on foreign-born persons can be beset by differential and at times contradictory outlooks. We show that these outlooks are often presented in the form of seemingly apolitical software infrastructures or decisions made in response to software with limited, if any, discretion available to bureaucrats, statisticians, and policymakers. Our two cases, Norway and Finland, are considered social-democratic regimes within Esping-Andersen’s famous global social policy typology. Using science and technology studies and specifically “double social life of methods,” we seek to trace how software emerges as both a device for administrative bookkeeping and also for enacting the “migrant” categories with particular implications for how the welfare state comes to be established and how welfare policies come to be implemented. We note that even if all statistical production necessarily involves inclusions and exclusions, how the “boundaries” are set for whom to include and exclude directly affects the lives of those implicated by these decisions, and as such, they are onto-political. This means that welfare policies get made at the point of sorting, categorizing, and ordering of data, even before it is fed into software and other administrative devices of government. In view of this, we show that methods enact their subjects—we detail how the methods set to identify and measure refugee statistics in Europe end up enacting the welfare services they have access to. We argue that with increasing automation and datafication, the scope of welfare systems is being curtailed under the label of efficiency, and individual contexts are ignored.


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