This paper analyzes the reasons for differences in the effect of retirement on health estimated results in previous studies. We investigate these differences by focusing on the analysis methods used by these studies. Using various health indexes, numerous researchers have examined the effects of retirement on health. However, there are no unified views on the impact of retirement on various health indexes. Consequently, we show that the choice of analysis method is one of the key factors in explaining why the estimated results of the effect of retirement on health differ. Moreover, we re-estimate the effect of retirement on health by using a fixed analysis method controlling for individual heterogeneity and endogeneity of the retirement behavior. We analyze the effect of retirement on health parameters, such as cognitive function, self-report of health, activities of daily living (ADL), depression, and body mass index in eight countries. We find that the effects of retirement on self-report of health, depression, and ADL are positive in many of these countries.

This paper studies the effect of retirement on lifestyle habits, including drinking, smoking, exercise, and sleeping, by using panel data from the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR). Rich information in JSTAR enables us to use an interesting instrumental variable to account for endogeneity. We have three contributions in this paper. This is the first paper that focuses on and investigates the mechanism of the relation between retirement and health, namely, lifestyle habits. Second, new results show that people reduce drinking after retirement and increase sleeping time on weekdays although smoking, frequency of exercise, and sleeping time on holidays seem to be unchanged. Third, controlling important factors also allows us to inspect the detailed channels between retirement and lifestyle habits. Our estimation suggests that the peer effect in the workplace may be influential mainly on drinking habits.

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This study aims to better understand the effects of retirement on health outcomes, which is of great interest worldwide, by examining the effects of retirement on health investment behaviors. To this end, we conducted a large-scale international comparison of the changes in health investment behaviors after retirement among the populations of seven developed countries using Global Aging Data, exploiting differences in the financial incentives in the pension systems of each country as our identification strategy. The results show that while elderly change their health investment behaviors in some way after retirement, the patterns of the changes in many health investment behaviors differ across each country. Further, a review of the literature and our results suggest that health investment behaviors are not necessarily determinants of the effects of retirement on health. JEL Classification Numbers: I00, I100, I120 Keywords: aging population, health investment behaviors, health outcomes, retirement, heterogeneity, global aging data * The authors are responsible for all remaining errors and interpretations. We certify that we have the right to deposit the contribution with MPRA.

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