Working and disability expectancies at older ages : the role of childhood circumstances and education
Abstract
The ability to work at older ages depends on health and education. Both accumulate starting very early in life. We assess how childhood disadvantages combine with education to affect working and health trajectories. Applying multistate period life tables to data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for the period 2008-2014, we estimate how the residual life expectancy at age 50 is distributed in number of years of work and disability, by number of childhood disadvantages, gender, and race/ethnicity. Our findings indicate that number of childhood disadvantages is negatively associated with work and positively with disability, irrespective of gender and race/ethnicity. Childhood disadvantages intersect with low education resulting in shorter lives, and redistributing life years from work to disability. Among the highly educated, health and work differences between groups of childhood disadvantage are small. Combining multistate models and inverse probability weighting, we show that the return of high education is greater among the most disadvantaged.
Citation
Lorenti , A , Dudel , C , Hale , J M & Myrskylä , M 2020 , ' Working and disability expectancies at older ages : the role of childhood circumstances and education ' , Social Science Research , vol. 91 , 102447 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2020.102447
Publication
Social Science Research
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0049-089XType
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.
Description
Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society.Collections
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