Separate studies of Australian and Danish retirees looked at the impact that retirement has on health outcomes. Neither study found a negative impact.

The Australian study analyzed how retirement impacted unexpected health outcomes (“health shocks”) through a questionnaire included in Australia’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) survey. Authors Bénédicte Apouey et. al found being retired and retiring both “increases the likelihood of positive health shocks and decreases the probability of negative shocks for men.” The data on women was less clear.

Retired men were more likely to expect their health to worsen than for it to improve. The opposite occurred, with retired men more frequently experiencing a self-declared improvement. The authors say these positive health shocks are being driven by two groups. The first is men who expect their health to worsen but experience no change. The second is men who don’t acknowledge any expectations but yet experience an improvement.

Women’s expectations of their health did not change when they went from working to being retired. As a group, they did not experience notable health shocks, though the data suggests that women are less likely to experience positive health shocks than men are.

The Danish study looked at what happened to retirees following a change in the minimum age for the Danish Old Age Pension (OAP), which was lowered by two years to age 65. It also looked at the Danish Early Retirement Pension (ERP), which prompted a large jump in retirement take-up at age 60.

For the OAP group, all measures of health or health care utilization showed no difference between those who weren’t eligible to retire until age 67 (before the OAP change occurred) and those who could retire at age 65. Gender and other socioeconomic indicators did not alter this finding.

For the ERP group, early retirement had no effect on mortality. Retirement was found to be associated with an approximate 10% drop in hospitalization rates. Retirees also visited their general practitioners 0.34 fewer times per year. The results were not significantly different for either gender.

Sources: “Retirement and Unexpected Health Shocks,” Bénédicte H. Apouey, Cahit Guven and Claudia Senik; IZA Discussion Paper 11226, December 2017; and “Sick of Retirement?,” Nick Fabrin Nielsen; SSRN, January 4, 2018.

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