Early retirement and mortality in Germany

Abstract

Differences in mortality by retirement age have an important impact on the financing of pension insurance, yet no clear-cut results for Germany exist so far. We calculate mortality rates by retirement age from microdata on all German old-age pensioners and 1.84 million deceases. The life expectancies and survival probabilities at age 65 are estimated for population subgroups according to creditable periods because of disease and pension income. Early-retired men who reach the age of 65 years live significantly longer the later early retirement occurs; the life expectancy at age 65 ranges from 13 to 17.8 years. For each retirement age, mortality of men is higher the more periods of disease are credited in the pension insurance system. For a given length of credited periods of disease, mortality of early retirees decreases with the retirement age. 'Healthy worker selection effects' operating in the labour market may contribute to these results. The 'work longer, live longer'-result is found for each pension income quintile, which resolves the J-curve pattern found in the literature. The mortality of female old-age pensioners varies little with retirement age.

Late retirement is not associated with increased mortality, results based on all Swedish retirements 1991–2007

“…In men, the association between retirement and mortality was weak and restricted to early pensioners, which supports previous findings including those of Kühntopf and Tivig [1][2][3][4][5][6]. We could also extend previous findings by showing that the increased risk was evident several years after retirement.…”

“…The increased risk was primarily seen in women with non-manual jobs, linked to death from CVD and in line with findings by Kühntopf and Tivig and Brockman et al [1,7], independent of age at retirement. We based our analyses on the entire population of Swedish women born 1930-1946 who were gainfully Fig.…”

Longevity Chance

“…[30][31][32] Mortality of the not-in-work in later life was found to be consistently higher than the in-work in Finland, Turin and England and Wales. 33 Chance had never thought much about retirement.…”

“…Work is a health-essential function. 24,[30][31][32][33] High creativity 24 and not to retire [30][31][32][33] may mean high Qmax. Science research is Chance's health-essential function in which prime time was in 1962 so that his prime age was 49 years old, but technology research, sailing and other physical activities are Chance's health-nonessential functions.…”

Nyugdíjreformok a posztszocialista EU tagállamokban 1989 óta

“…Valóban, nemzedéken belüli egyenlőtlenség a várható élet-tartamok és a munkával járó fáradtság szóródásában jelenik meg a magas és alacsony keresetűek között. Ennek megfelelően, egyes kutatások arra mutatnak rá, hogy a hosszabban élő dolgozók halasztják el a nyugdíjba vonulást (Kühntopf-Tivig 2012). Egy nyugdíjrendszer, amely kizárólag szabványos biztosításmatematikai elveken és országos statisztikai hivatal által számított élettáblákon alapul, képtelen számot vetni ezzel az antiszelekciós problémával.…”