Is an early retirement offer good for your health? Quasi-experimental evidence from the army.

This paper studies empirically the consequences on health of an early retirement offer. To this end we use a targeted retirement offer to military officers 55 years of age or older. Before the offer was implemented, the normal retirement age in the Swedish defense was 60 years of age. Estimating the effect of the offer on individuals' health within the age range 56-70, we find support for a reduction in both mortality and in inpatient care as a consequence of the early retirement offer. Increasing the mandatory retirement age may thus not only have positive government income effects but also negative effects on increasing government health care expenditures.

Moving in and out of public old age care among the very old in Sweden.

In this paper, we present empirical results for the very old (75+) concerning transitions between independent living in ordinary home without public support, independent living in ordinary home or special accommodations with home help and home health care, and living in around the clock care. We investigate the role of age and gender, dependency in activities of daily living (ADL) and the informal support from a partner. We also study mortality conditional on the above-mentioned variables and on the mode of old age care. The results show that the propensity to move to a more intensive mode of care is less for males, higher with more limitations in personal ADL and increasing with age. There is also a stabilizing effect of the availability of informal care support, as measured by marriage or cohabitation, as it makes it less likely to move from the current care mode. In the case of mortality, the observed relations pointed in the expected directions-mortality increasing with increasing PADL-limitations and age and being higher for men than for women. The age relation, however, does not hold in the same way in around the clock care. The estimated relationships are used as input in a micro-simulation model intended for analysis of the effect of population aging on the needs and resource requirements for old age care in Sweden.