Retirement and health outcomes in a meta-analytical framework

Abstract

This paper presents a meta-analysis on the effects of retirement on health. We selected academic papers published between 2000 and 2021 and studying the impact of retirement on physical and mental health, self-assessed general health, healthcare utilization and mortality. Our search resulted in a dataset consisting of 308 observations from 85 articles. Using meta-regression analysis and after checking for the presence of publication bias, we found that the average effect of retirement on health outcomes is very small and barely significant, under the assumption of a common true effect. We applied model averaging techniques to explore possible sources of heterogeneity of the true effect. Our findings suggest that effect heterogeneity across results is explained by the differences in both health measurements and retirement schemes. In particular, mandatory or involuntary retirement is associated with a negative impact of retirement on health, although it is small in magnitude.