{"title":"The Effect of Retirement on Mental Health: Indirect Treatment Effects and Causal Mediation","authors":"M. Salm, B. Siflinger, M. Xie","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3824793","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3824793","url":null,"abstract":"People experience multiple changes in their lives after retirement which can affect their mental health. In this paper, we examine the mediating impact of grandparental childcare in the effect of retirement on mental health among elderly women in Europe. We apply a semi-parametric estimation strategy to disentangle the total effect of retirement on mental health into a direct effect, and an indirect effect mediated through grandparental childcare. We find that retirement directly leads to a significant increase in mental health problems. However, this effect is completely offset by a significant reduction in mental health problems generated by a mediating effect of grandparental childcare. As a result, the total effect of retirement on mental health is close to zero. We then examine country-specific heterogeneity in the provision of public childcare and find that the mediating effect unfolds its full compensating strength in countries in which grandparental childcare is supplemental to public childcare. Our results have important implications for designing old-age social policies.","PeriodicalId":254054,"journal":{"name":"Aging & Long-Term Care eJournal","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132380608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Analysis of the Health and Retirement Status of the Elderly","authors":"R. Sickles, P. Taubman","doi":"10.3386/W1459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W1459","url":null,"abstract":"in this paper we specify and estimate a structural limited dependent variable model with which we study both the health and retirement status of the elderly. Standard linear estimators, which assume that these variable sare continuous, are not appropriate and categorical estimation techniques are preferred. Our model differs from previous work in that we have longitudinal data and random effects that are correlated over time for different individuals. The problem is made more complicated because there is sample truncation, which could potentially bias coefficient estimates, since approximately twenty percent of the individuals in our sample die. We outline the full information maximum likelihood estimator for such a model and implement it in our empirical analysis. With our structural estimates we analyze, among other things, the degree to which endogeneously determined health status affects the probability of retirement and how changes in social security benefits and eligibility for transfer payments modify both healthiness and the demand for leisure.","PeriodicalId":254054,"journal":{"name":"Aging & Long-Term Care eJournal","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1984-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128146196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}