Waiting to get a pension: The impact of pension eligibility on psychological distress.

In this paper, we examine how pension eligibility affects the psychological distress levels of older women in Australia by exploiting the exogenous changes in the eligibility ages of the old Age Pension (AP). The unique features of the Australian AP allow us to study the impact of the reform on the non-working, as well as on the working population. The empirical results show that pension eligibility has a modest but consistently beneficial effect on psychological stress levels. Reaching pension eligibility significantly reduces the stress levels of women who were out of the labor force, indicating the positive role of the AP for disadvantaged groups. At the same time, women with strenuous jobs experience a significant improvement in their stress levels when they transit into retirement. We show that an improvement in stress levels accompanies an increase in financial security and improvements in social participation and health behaviors. Our results highlight the potentially overlooked consequences of pension reforms for the well-being of vulnerable populations and for health inequalities across socio-economic groups.

Personality, gender, and age resilience to the mental health effects of COVID-19.

RATIONALE: Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on different population cohorts and which personality traits affected individual's coping responses can help identify strategies to promote self-directed behaviours, thereby enhancing and maintaining individual's mental well-being. OBJECTIVE: Using longitudinal data for the UK, we examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals' mental well-being, focusing on age, gender, and personality traits as possible modifiers. METHODS: We explore the longitudinal nature of the data using individual fixed effects models, which implicitly control for unobserved time-invariant individual-level characteristics. Our sample is an unbalanced panel consisting of 373,555 person-years observations, observed from 2009 until June 2020. RESULTS: The negative impacts of the first months of the pandemic period are found to be larger for young adults (aged 16-25 years) and vary by personality traits. The increase in psychological distress symptoms is more pronounced for individuals who score higher in neuroticism, extroversion, and openness to experience. Indeed, for introverted young people, recent events may have actually brought a sense of calm. Other findings indicate that worsening in the psychological distress level occurs alongside with increased feelings of loneliness. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings support the theoretical knowledge that different people have different psychological and behaviour responses and personality concepts can be used when studying individual's adaptive behaviour in critical situations such as COVID-19. Our results indicate the necessity of public health programmes to assist distressed young individuals.

The effect of bereavement on cognitive functioning among elderly people: Evidence from Australia.

This paper explores the effects of experiencing the death of a spouse, relative or close friend on cognitive functioning of Australian elderly. Using rich longitudinal data, we show that experiencing a loss is associated with a modest decline in cognitive function. Our results show that on average the effects are more pronounced for males and the strongest effects are associated with the loss of the spouse or a close friend. These events have significant effects on working memory and speed of information processing. We show that the decrease in cognitive functioning is accompanied by decreases in engagement in cognitive activities and declines in socialization. Our results are suggestive that programmes to support grieving individuals, including support for socialization activities, and extending active aging programmes could be important for promoting successful cognitive aging for the growing population of older adults.

The effect of retirement on elderly cognitive functioning.

Cognitive functioning exhibits a clear lifecycle pattern with a general deterioration over older ages. This article estimates the short-term effect of retirement on cognitive performance of elderly Australians by exploiting the exogenous variation in retirement decisions induced by changes in social security eligibility rules. The empirical results show that on average retirement has a negative but modest effect on cognition, and the rate of cognitive decline with age is greater for men than women. The results for women display no significant effects on working memory and speed of information processing. The article further adds to the literature by providing evidence on the possible mechanisms through which retirement could affect individual's cognitive performance. We find that moving into retirement leads women to increase the time spent in mental and household activities, which may in part explain the modest effect we observe for women.

Work-related health risks in Europe: are older workers more vulnerable?

Recent policy reforms in a number of countries are extending working lives and deferring the statutory retirement age. Yet such changes may have profound implications for the well-being of older workers if such individuals are more likely to suffer work-related health problems. Using international data from the European Working Conditions Survey for 2005, we test whether older workers (aged 55-65 years) differ significantly from younger workers across a range of self-reported job-related indicators including health risk perception, mental and physical health, sickness absence, injury and fatigue. We estimate discrete choice (probit) models of the outcomes above for a sample comprising 17,459 individuals in 23 countries, and control for personal, job and work characteristics including exposure to physical, ergonomic and psychosocial risk factors. Our results show that failure to account for both endogeneity and the 'healthy worker effect' (sample selection) can lead to misleading inferences. The latter is especially important: only after controlling for selection bias (using a re-weighting approach) do we find older workers are more 'vulnerable' than their younger counterparts in the sense of being significantly more likely to perceive each of the various adverse health outcomes above, with the exception of injury. For the remaining indicators, our estimates suggest the magnitude of this difference is substantial: between 5 and 11 percentage points compared with prime age workers, and 8 and 14 points relative to workers aged 15-35, depending on the measure under consideration.