Short-Run Health Consequences of Retirement and Pension Benefits: Evidence from China
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Plamen Nikolov
und
Alan Adelman
Abstract
This paper examines the impact of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) in China. Exploiting the staggered implementation of an NRPS policy expansion that began in 2009, we use a difference-in-difference approach to study the effects of the introduction of pension benefits on the health status, health behaviors, and healthcare utilization of rural Chinese adults age 60 and above. The results point to three main conclusions. First, in addition to improvements in self-reported health, older adults with access to the pension program experienced significant improvements in several important measures of health, including mobility, self-care, usual activities, and vision. Second, regarding the functional domains of mobility and self-care, we found that the females in the study group led in improvements over their male counterparts. Third, in our search for the mechanisms that drive positive retirement program results, we find evidence that changes in individual health behaviors, such as a reduction in drinking and smoking, and improved sleep habits, play an important role. Our findings point to the potential benefits of retirement programs resulting from social spillover effects. In addition, these programs may lessen the morbidity burden among the retired population.
Acknowledgments
We thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for comments that significantly improved the paper. We also thank Matthew Bonci, Dayne Feehan, Jake Tuckman, and Xu Wang for outstanding research support with this project. We thank David Canning, Subal Kumbhakar, Eric Edmonds, Seema Jayachandran, Keisuke Hirano, Sam Asher, Livia Montana, Petra Todd, Susan Wolcott, Nusrat Jimi, Wei Xiao, Solomon Polachek, Zili Yang, James MacKinnon and Morten Nielsen for constructive feedback and helpful comments. Plamen Nikolov gratefully acknowledges research support by The Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Economics Department at the State University of New York (Binghamton) and the Research Foundation for SUNY at Binghamton. All remaining errors are our own. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/fhep-2017-0031).
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