Health, Work Capacity and Retirement in Sweden

Abstract

Following an era of a development towards earlier retirement, there has been a reversed trend to later exit from the labor market in Sweden since the late 1990s. We investigate whether or not there are potentials, with respect to health and work capacity of the population, for extending this trend further. We use two different methods. First, the Milligan and Wise (2012) method, which calculates how much people would participate in the labor force at a constant mortality rate. Second, the Cutler et al. (2012) method, which asks how much people would participate in the labor force if they would work as much as the age group 50-54 at a particular level of health. We also provide evidence on the development of self-assessed health and health inequality in the Swedish population.