The Effect of Removing Early Retirement on Mortality

• Authors: Han Ye, Cristina Bellés Obrero and Sergi Jiménez-Martín.
• Keywords: heterogeneity , mortality , early retirement , delaying retirement , work conditions
• JEL codes: I10, I12, J14, J26

This paper studies the mortality effects of delaying retirement by leveraging the 1967 Spanish pension reform, which exogenously increased the earliest voluntary claiming age from 60 to 65 based on individuals’ date of first contribution. Using Spanish administrative data, we find that removing access to early retirement delays age at last employment by 4 months and increases the probability of death between ages 60 and 69 by 11 percent. The mortality effects are concentrated among workers in physically demanding, high-psychosocial-burden, and low- skilled occupations, while men and women are affected similarly. Access to flexible retirement mitigates the adverse effects of delaying retirement.