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A0460
Title: Health transition after retirement: Empirical evidence from public pension reform in Japan Authors:  Fengming Chen - Tohoku University (Japan)
Midori Wakabayashi - Tohoku University (Japan)
Michio Yuda - Tohoku University (Japan) [presenting]
Abstract: An important common issue among developed counties with aging populations to clarify the mechanisms of retirement and health transition is to consider a problem between the elderly's quality of life and social costs of medical and long-term care expenditures. We use the individual panel data from the four waves of the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement from 2007 to 2013 to examine how retirement from the labor market affects the health transition of elderly males. In the empirical analysis, we focus on the natural experiment of gradual pensionable age increases for the earnings-related public pension system in Japan depending on birth cohort and use fixed-effect instrumental variable estimation to deal with the endogenous problem of the retirement decision. We find that retirement significantly improves mental health and chewing ability but make them more susceptible to lifestyle-related diseases. Our supplemental results indicate that a significant increase in dentistry utilization after retirement would contribute to chewing improvement but that other daily habits and health care utilization are not significantly affected by retirement.