Current working papers: The Health Consequences of Retirement (Jan 2011) This paper examines the impact of retirement on individuals' health. Declines in health commonly compel individuals to retire, so the main challenge is to bypass the reverse causal effect. In other words, there are unobserved variables that drive health changes and subsequently affect retirement. To isolate and quantify the effect of retirement on health, I employ an instrumental variables strategy. The instrument primarily includes workers' reported probabilities of working past ages 62 and 65, taken from the first period in which they are observed. The instrument set is not correlated with unobserved health shocks that are unanticipated to individuals, but it may be linked to their unobserved anticipated information. I control for these factors using flexible interactions of original period health indicators and parental age. These controls serve as health-trend and hereditary predictors with which individuals forecast their health evolution. Estimation results indicate that the retirement effect on health is beneficial and statistically significant, and its influence is most potent for individuals in the middle of the health level distribution. Investigation into health behavior data, such as smoking and exercise, suggests that retirement affects health through behavioral channels; with additional leisure time, many retirees invest in their health via healthy habits. Health Effects of the American Diet: The Case of Immigrants, with Sukanya Basu (Oct 2011) We compare body mass index (BMI) of immigrants in the United States to that of natives. We observe that (on average) immigrants' BMI converges to natives' as the length of their U.S. residency increases. For the analysis, we use the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES), a large nationally representative cross-sectional survey which contains extensive microdata on demographics, health, weight history, nutrition, physical activity, and more. We observe immigrants' time since migration, which allows us to isolate differences in their attributes, conditional on their duration of residency. We find that BMI convergence persists across all age-ranges after controlling for a large set of observable demographic and physical characteristics. We explore the root causes of this “catch-up effect,” determining that it occurs primarily due to changes in immigrants' nutrition: The longer they live in the U.S., the more likely they are to adopt high fat, high sugar diets. In addition to dietary behavior, changes in immigrants' physical activity levels contribute to the weight gain of younger genenerations more than older ones. |
