Self-Reported vs. Objective Measures of Health in Retirement Modelsreport
Аннотация: health on labor force participation.while the endogeneity of self-reported health is likely to lead to our exaggerating its impact.Biases in our estimation of health's impact on outcomes will also induce biases on coefficients of any variables correlated with health.Finally the dependence of self-reported health on the economic environment will induce a bias on estimates of the impact of economic variables on participation, regardless of whether we correctly measure the impact of health itself.4Most work on the labor supply of older men has relied on self-reported measures of health.More recently a variety of authors have argued for the use of more objective indicators of health:responses to questions about specific health conditions or limitations, doctors' reports or information on mortality.5While such proxies are, presumably, more objective than are self-reported health measures, it is not clear that the use of such proxies will give us a more accurate indication of the impact of health on labor market outcomes.As long as these health proxies are not perfectly correlated with the aspects of health that impact on economic outcomes, they will suffer from errors in variables problems.With self-reported health measures we have biases working in opposite directions and there is some chance they may tend to cancel out.With objective measures there is only one bias, and, as long as the correlation between the proxy and actual health isn't close to perfect, the bias will be quite substantial.The issues here are important for our understanding not only of the importance of health, but also of the impact of economic variables on early retirement.Both subjective and objective health indicators are correlated with such things as education, race, pre-retirement earnings and pre-retirement occupation.These factors are also important indicators of early labor market withdrawal.On one interpretation of these facts, it is the poor labor market prospects of these men that induces them to leave the labor force.On another it is their health.The literature that has compared results using a variety of different health measures has tended to find that health seems to play a smaller role and economic variables a greater one when the more objective proxies are used.Most authors have interpreted these results as an indication of the biases inherent in using self-reported measures.6These authors have typically either ignored the possible biases inherent in the use of a proxy, or have assumed that these biases are small in comparison to the ones introduced by the use of self-reported measures.Others have argued in favor of using self-reported information.7These authors emphasize the These comments will be made mor'e precise shortly.
Год издания: 1989
Авторы: John Bound
Ключевые слова: Retirement, Disability, and Employment, Global Health Care Issues, Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics
Другие ссылки: doi.org (HTML)
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (HTML)
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (HTML)
Открытый доступ: bronze