What are the health effects of postponing retirement? An instrumental variable approach

This essay estimates the causal effect of postponing retirement on a wide range of health outcomes using Swedish administrative data on cause-specific mortality, hospital­izations and drug prescriptions. Exogenous variation in retirement timing comes from a reform which raised the age at which broad categories of Swedish local government workers were entitled to retire with full pension benefits from 63 to 65. Instrumental variable estimation results show no evidence that postponing retirement impacts mortality or health care utilization.