The effect of post-retirement employment on health

Abstract This paper investigates the causal impact of re-entering the labour force from retirement on self-rated health and depressive symptoms paying careful attention to potential differences by gender. To address the potential endogeneity of work force re-entry, we use an instrumental variables approach in a conditional mixed process model combined with a correlated random effects specification estimated on data from 11 waves of the U.S. Health and Retirement Study. Results indicate a beneficial effect of post-retirement employment on self-assessed health and depressive symptoms for both women and men.