Essays on aging, health, and labor market

• Main Author: WANG, Lanjie
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: Labor market; unemployment; aging; health behavior; household spending; life satisfaction; retirement; Health Economics; Labor Economics
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/635; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/etd_coll/article/1633/viewcontent/GPEC_AY2020_PhD_Lanjie_Wang.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This dissertation consists of four chapters on aging, health, and labor economics. In the first chapter, we investigate the short-term impacts of unemployment on older workers in Singapore, a setting without public unemployment insurance. Using monthly panel data, we analyze dynamic impacts on income, spending, health, and subjective well-being over two years post-unemployment. We find substantial initial earnings losses with incomplete recovery, with income remaining 46.5% below pre-unemployment levels after 24 months. Despite this persistent income gap, consumption responses are modest and comparable to countries with strong social safety nets, suggesting robust self-insurance mechanisms. We observe increased retirement among married individuals but no significant spousal earnings response. Health status remains unchanged, but sleep quality and life satisfaction decrease. Our findings suggest potentially modest welfare gains from introducing unemployment benefits in Singapore. In the second chapter, we conduct a randomized controlled trial in which participants are presented with the correct weight category based on their body mass index to remove any weight misperception, and then given six biweekly reminders about healthy diet and physical activity via SMS/email. We find that our intervention reduces individuals’ weight misperception and encourages healthier dietary choices. However, it has little impact on their physical activity. We further show that people who were obese and those who underestimated their weight status in the baseline survey maintain healthier dietary choices for at least six months after the intervention. In the third chapter, we use an event study design to explore monthly dynamic effects of major health shocks on labour market outcomes, expenditures, and subjective well-being of patients and their spouses. We find that following a major health shock, patients’ health satisfaction decreases by around 16.8%, and such a decrease persists for one year. Furthermore, there is a spillover on their spouses, as their spouses’ health satisfaction also decreases by about 5.7% and lasts for half a year. Notably, the negative spillover effects are prominent for male spouses. By contrast, overall life satisfaction adapts sooner (six months) and decreases by a similar magnitude for both patients (6.1%) and spouses (5.7%). In terms of labour market outcomes, patients’ probability of working full-time decreases by 5% for six months, and their labour income decreases by about 40%, but there is little effect on their spouses. However, spouses decrease their likelihood of (early) retirement for 11 months. In addition, both patients and their spouses have a lower job satisfaction for the first three months after patients’ health shock. As for household expenditure, except for a surge in health spending, other expenditures remain at a similar level for patients and their spouses, which may explain why the economic satisfaction has little change. In the fourth chapter, I examine the short-term effects of retirement on older adults’ mental health. Using a regression discontinuity approach, I analyse the role of social activities in shaping the effect of retirement on mental health by exploiting depression indicators in older adults’ mental health. The results show that retirement improves self-identity and reduces stress, sadness, and fear, mainly among men. People with greater education benefit from retirement, because they increase their sense of self-identity and happiness while decreasing stress, sadness, loneliness, and fear. However, people with lower education experience increased loneliness after retirement. These findings suggest that when proposing measures that encourage people to postpone retirement, policymakers should complement them with actions that can mitigate the impact of late retirement on depression, such as more frequent social activities among older people.