No abstract

We investigate the relationship between ageing, cognitive abilities and retirement using the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a household panel that offers the possibility of comparing several European countries using nationally representative samples of the population aged 50+. The human capital framework suggests that retirement may cause an increase in cognitive decline, since after retirement individuals lose the market incentive to invest in cognitive repair activities. Our empirical results, based on an instrumental variable strategy to deal with the potential endogeneity of retirement, confirm this key prediction. They also indicate that education plays a fundamental role in explaining heterogeneity in the level of cognitive abilities.

In this paper we exploit the 1947 change to the minimum school-leaving age in England from 14 to 15, to evaluate the causal effect of a year of education on cognitive abilities at older ages. We use a regression discontinuity design analysis and find a large and significant effect of the reform on males’ memory and executive functioning at older ages, using simple cognitive tests from the English Longitudinal Survey on Ageing (ELSA) as our outcome measures. This result is particularly remarkable since the reform had a powerful and immediate effect on about half the population of 14-year-olds. We investigate and discuss the potential channels by which this reform may have had its effects, as well as carrying out a full set of sensitivity analyses and robustness checks.

This paper analyzes the quality of subjective assessments related to childhood circumstances when provided by old-age individuals. Early life events are important for social scientists to predict individual outcomes later in life and because of data restrictions, retrospective assessments are often used. Nevertheless, there is widespread skepticism on the ability of old-age respondents to recall with good accuracy events occurred many years ago. Using data from the survey of health, aging and retirement in Europe (SHARE), we assess the internal and external consistency of some measures of childhood health and socio-economic status. Our study suggests that overall respondents seem to remember fairly well their health status and their living conditions between age 0-15. Applying a cross-country comparison (13 European countries), we analyse within survey responses with external historical data (e.g., GDP per capita in period 1926-1956) at a country and cohort level. Our results should mitigate some of the doubts on retrospective data collection and promote their use for research purposes.