The Early Retirement Decision: New Empirical Evidence on the Influence of Health

Many studies have examined the influence of health on retirement, but there may be problems with the various health measures used. A major criticism of the most frequently used variables is that they may reflect ex post rationalizations of retirement. In this paper I examine a variety of health variables, focusing directly on the health measurement issue as it relates to retirement research. New measures of health are developed with individual self-evaluations of health status. Unlike most previous findings, the empirical results suggest that economic variables play a more important role than health in retirement decisions.