BLAKE Helene

How does the retirement age affect the physical and mental health of seniors? We identify this effect based on the 1993 reform of the French pension system, which was heterogeneously introduced among the population. With each cohort, the French government gradually increased the incentive to work using two tools: the contribution period required for entitlement to a full pension and the number of reference earning years taken to calculate pensions. We use a unique database on health and employment in France in 1999 and 2005, when the cohorts affected by the reform started to retire. A difference-in-differences approach, with the control group comprising public sector employees (not concerned by the 1993 reform), finds that the people more affected by the reform, and hence with a stronger incentive to work, were those posting less of an improvement and even a deterioration in their health between 1999 and 2005. Subsequently, taking the reform as a tool to filter out the potential influence of health on employment choices, we show that retirement improves physical and social health. The more physically impacted are the low-educated individuals.

We measure the effects of the 1993 French pension reform on health, especially the reform has gradually increased the length of the contribution period required to benefit from a full pension, as well as the number of earnings years taken into account to calculate pension benefits. Most importantly, the reform heterogeneously has affected different cohorts of individuals, creating a quasi-experimental framework. Given that this reform concerned only private sector workers, we use the results of a survey on health ran in 2005 and a difference-in-differences analysis to compare health outcomes between two population samples, one composed of private sector workers and another of public sector workers. The results show significant differences between these two samples in two health measures – perceived health and physical health – but concentrated on less-educated individuals exclusively.

This thesis empirically studies different facets of senior citizens' behaviors in the context of an individualization of retirement choices linked to reforms of the old-age insurance systems. The first two chapters are analyses of the impact of work on health where I use the reforms of the French general pension scheme as exogenous shocks. Health is evaluated on two criteria: well-being (physical, mental, social) and mortality. I show the harmful effects of work on physical health and that it increases mortality. However, the nature and magnitude of the effects are very heterogeneous according to gender, education or income level. Less educated people suffer more physical damage from work, and women improve their sociability more than men after retirement. Working time during life increases mortality for men with the lowest pensions (less than 954 euros per month), while other income groups are more affected by retirement age. The third chapter compares the rigidity of employment rates of older workers in the face of pension reforms in OECD countries. Without any real causal link, pension reforms aimed at increasing the employment of older workers are much more effective when labour relations are considered harmonious. Moreover, the rigidity of employment is accompanied by a strong dispersion of opinions on this issue within the population. The origin of the heterogeneities in behavior must be analyzed. The fourth chapter focuses on one of them: differences in the experiences of older workers with economic shocks. I show that economic growth during childhood makes people more optimistic about the future of the US economy. The sons of the unemployed are more pessimistic than the rest of the population about their own future in the labor market. This pessimism is not justified because they are less likely to be fired from their jobs. In addition, they are more risk-averse and uncertain as they are less likely to invest their capital in the financial markets and more likely to frame their inheritance through the writing of a will. Sufficiently high unemployment benefits reduce or even cancel this phenomenon.