While poor health conditions can lead to an early retirement, a new study suggests that health improves after retirement — though perhaps not immediately.
Better yet, the research finds that retirement has no statistically significant impact on health care utilization, at least in the long run.
The report, Does Retirement Improve Health and Life Satisfaction?, finds what the researchers described as “strong evidence” that retirement improves both health and life satisfaction. While the impact on life satisfaction occurs within the first 4 years of retirement, the research claims that many of the improvements in health show up 4 or more years later, consistent with the view that health is a stock that evolves slowly.
The report notes that while early studies often find negative impacts of retirement on health and well-being, more recent studies correct for selection into retirement and find not only that the effects of retirement on objective health measures largely disappear, but that retirement improves self-reported health.
In addition, by utilizing more recent data and studying dynamic changes in health outcomes, they find improvements in long-term health outcomes that have not been found in past studies. Indeed, they claim to be the first paper to discover positive long-term effects in measureable health outcomes for U.S. retirees.
They also note that if their assessment of health as a variable that evolves over time in retirement, it is likely that a longer horizon may uncover even more health benefits of retirement.
