Retirement Patterns in Europe: The Effect of Health

Enrica Croda, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
Agar Brugiavini, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
Franco Peracchi, Tor Vergata University

This paper investigates the retirement decisions of older Europeans using a newly available pan-European dataset, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). In particular, we analyze the role played by health factors and by social security and pension rules in shaping labor supply and retirement decisions. The preliminary results indicate that institutional differences in welfare systems clearly affect the distribution and age pattern of participation in the labor market and of retirement. In addition, we find that there is potentially huge unused labor capacity in countries such as Austria, Italy and France where “healthy” individuals are not in the labor force.