Health among workers retiring after the state pension age: a longitudinal and comparative study

BACKGROUND: In recent decades, many countries have observed increasing labor force participation beyond the state pension age (SPA). However, there is a lack of research on employment beyond SPA and how it relates to older workers’ health. Moreover, there is a need to better understand how institutional factors affect the relationship between older workers’ employment and health. In this study, we examine simultaneous employment and health trajectories over 11 years in 12 countries from Europe and the Americas, and study how these trajectories differ by welfare state regime and level of old-age pension redistribution. METHODS: We used a harmonized pooled-country dataset of 3699 older workers based on four representative panel surveys: the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), and the Chilean Social Protection Survey (EPS). We conducted multichannel sequence analysis to estimate the types of simultaneous employment–health trajectories, and multinomial regression analysis to examine the relationship between trajectory types and institutional factors. RESULTS: We found that late retirement was equally associated with poor and good health. There is also a higher prevalence of late retirement trajectories in combination with poor health in liberal welfare regimes and in countries with lower levels of old-age pension redistribution. CONCLUSION: Our study indicates that nonliberal welfare regimes and redistributive old-age pension policies may be better suited to protect vulnerable workers while providing those in good health with the opportunity to work beyond the SPA. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12877-022-03690-4.