Grossman's Health Threshold and Retirement
42 Pages Posted: 27 Jan 2009
Date Written: December 26, 2008
Abstract
The authors formulate a stylized structural model of health, wealth accumulation and retirement decisions building on the human capital framework of health provided by Grossman. They explicitly assume a functional form of the utility function and carefully account for initial conditions, which allow them to derive analytic solutions for the time paths of consumption, health, health investment, savings and retirement. They argue that the Grossman literature has been unnecessarily restrictive in assuming that health is always at Grossman's "optimal" health level. Exploring the properties of corner solutions they find that advances in population health (health capital) can explain the paradox that while population health and mortality have continued to improve in the developed world, retirement ages have continued to fall with retirees pointing to deteriorating health as an important reason for early retirement. They find that improvements in population health decrease the retirement age, while at the same time individuals retire when their health has deteriorated. In their model, workers with higher human capital (say white collar workers) invest more in health and because they stay healthier retire later than those with lower human capital (say blue collar workers) whose health deteriorates faster. Plausibly, most individuals are endowed with an initial stock of health that is substantially greater than the level required to be economically productive.
Keywords: health, demand for health, health capital, medical care, labor, retirement
JEL Classification: I10, I12, J00, J24, J26
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Uncertain Lifetime, Life Protection, and the Value of Life Saving
-
Erratum to 'Uncertain Lifetime, Life Protection, and the Value of Life Saving'
-
Does Retirement Affect Cognitive Functioning?
By Eric Bonsang, Stephane Adam, ...
-
Grossman's Missing Health Threshold
By Titus J. Galama and Arie Kapteyn
-
Aging, Cognitive Abilities and Retirement
By Fabrizio Mazzonna and Franco Peracchi
-
Ageing, Cognitive Abilities and Retirement
By Fabrizio Mazzonna and Franco Peracchi
-
Socioeconomic Differences in Health Over the Life Cycle in an Egalitarian Country
By Hans Van Kippersluis, Owen A. O'donnell, ...
-
By Fabrizio Mazzonna and James W. Banks
-
Why Does Human Capital Need a Journal?
By Isaac Ehrlich and Kevin M. Murphy