published in: European Journal of Health Economics, 2022, 23, 511–535
Social support is increasingly acknowledged as an important resource for promoting wellbeing. We test whether social support changes around retirement. We also examine whether social support moderates dynamics in mental wellbeing around retirement and consider both own and spouse's retirement. Using longitudinal data from Australia, we find little effect of own or spouse's retirement on social support. However, in fixed-effects models, dynamics in mental wellbeing are significantly different between those with low/high social support. Using pension eligibility as an instrument, we find that own retirement causally improves mental wellbeing for women (weaker evidence for men) and by a similar degree for those with low/high social support. We also estimate responses to life satisfaction and find evidence that spill-over benefits from spousal retirement are much larger for individuals with low social support.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.