Health Capacity to Work and Retirement Expectations

By Italo Lopez Garcia, Nicole Maestas & Kathleen J. Mullen Understanding how health influences retirement is fundamental for the design of targeted policies that encourage working longer. While there is wide agreement on the relevance of age-related health decline for determining retirement decisions, the process remains a black box. This paper explores the match between individuals’ functional abilities and job demands in the national economy using a new methodology to measure work capacity. Specifically, we construct a measure of work...