CERGAS Seminar "Mortality and risk of cardiovascular diseases by age at retirement in three Italian cohorts"

Coauthors: Leombruni Roberto, Costa Giuseppe, d’Errico Angelo

The study aimed to assess the long-term risk of mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) associated with age at retirement in three large Italian cohorts: the Italian Longitudinal Study (ILS), the Turin Longitudinal Study (TLS), and the Working Histories Italian Panel (WHIP-Health), all part of the official Italian mortality and morbidity surveillance system. Subjects who retired between the ages of 50 and 65 were enrolled, and their health was monitored for 9 years through record linkage with administrative archives. The risk of mortality and CVDs associated with age at retirement, kept continuous, was assessed using Cox regression models, adjusted for education, household typology, chronic morbidity, and age, treated as a time-varying covariate. In the WHIP dataset, socioeconomic covariates are different due to data limitation and include occupational class, weekly wage, sector of activity, macro region of birth and an indicator for chronic morbidity. Analyses were stratified by gender.

The study found that older age at retirement was significantly associated with increased mortality among men in all three cohorts, with a 5%-9% rise in risk for each additional year of work. Additionally, the risk of CVD was also linked to a higher retirement age, with a 3%-6% increase for each additional year worked among men. However, the results for women were less consistent across studies, showing some excess risk of mortality and CVD associated with a higher retirement age in only some of the cohorts.

These findings suggest a potential negative impact of working later in life for men and emphasize the need to consider this when formulating policies aimed at raising the retirement age.

Speaker:

Chiara Ardito is a Quantitative Policy Analyst in Impact Evaluation at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy. She is also an affiliated fellow at LABORatorio R.Revelli – Centre for Employment Studies and at the Netspar – Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement. She previously served as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics of Ca' Foscari University of Venice and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Torino. Her research interests include health economics, labour economics, counterfactual policy impact evaluation, aging workforce, and the relationship between work, socio-economic conditions, and health.

Link zoom: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/93021288491?pwd=Z2ZzajlSZEdKT0trN3Q0RGhld3IzQT09

Meeting ID: 930 2128 8491

Passcode: 847744

Lunch bags at the end of the meeting: for those willing to participate in person, click here before the 25th of January.