With Booze, You Lose: The Mortality Effects of Early Retirement

This study analyzes the effect of introducing early public pension schemes on male mortality. I exploit two reforms in Switzerland, which allowed men as of a certain cohort to retire one and two years before the statutory retirement age. This generates two sharp eligibility cutoff dates, which I use in a regression discontinuity design. I draw from two full sample administrative data sets: the mortality and the old age insurance register. Allowing men to retire two years before the statutory retirement age increases overall male mortality by roughly 1.1 percentage points. The mortality effect is driven by lifestyle diseases, such as alcohol dependence or respiratory diseases. The effects are largest for unmarried men and for men living in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, where the social norm towards work is stronger than in the Latin-speaking part. Also, the effect is most pronounced in the middle of the income distribution. The results favor the lifestyle hypothesis, suggesting that retirement can increase mortality due to a loss of structure and a concomitant unhealthy lifestyle.