•Impact of retirement on health is an important research topic related to public finance as well as individual welfare.•We focus on Body Mass Index and weight outcome effects due to mandatory ...retirement-age policy for employees in urban China.•After reaching mandatory retirement age, retirement rates increase markedly and discontinuously for Chinese men and women.•Retirement increases weight and BMI among men but not women. This male effect is much larger for men with low education.•Drinking and eating more, fewer physical activities are channels which may induce related male weight and BMI increases.
This paper analyzes the causal impact of retirement in China on Body Mass Index (BMI) and weight, which are a good gauge of the risk for some diseases. Many middle income developing countries are aging very rapidly and may have to adjust the retirement age to have financially feasible government budgets. It is important to know and understand any plausible health consequences of raising the retirement age in developing countries, and which sub-populations within these countries may be most affected. By using 2011, 2013 and 2015 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), our identification strategy uses variation in China’s mandatory retirement age with a fuzzy discontinuity design to examine an exogenous shock to retirement behavior. Our study finds that retirement will increase weight and BMI among men. This effect is much larger for men with low education. The channel may be that men with low education drink more and take less vigorous exercises after they get retired. Retirement does not affect weight and BMI for women. These effects are robust with different definitions of retirement, narrow retirement bandwidth for samples as well as dropping samples with rural Hukou.
To date there has been little agreement on the effect of retirement on tourism consumption, and “retirement-tourism consumption puzzle” has not been empirically tested. Taking advantage of the ...mandatory retirement policy in China, this study adopts the fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD) approach to examine whether there is a “retirement-tourism consumption puzzle.” The findings indicate that the retirement of household heads significantly boosts household tourism consumption. The results also illustrate the considerable moderating effects of self-assessed health level and pension level on household tourism consumption. The research framework can be generalized to other countries to identify the effect of retirement on tourism consumption.
Retirement flexibility and inability to borrow against future labor income can significantly affect optimal consumption and investment. With voluntary retirement, there exists an optimal ...wealth-to-wage ratio threshold for retirement and human capital correlates negatively with the stock market even when wages have zero or slightly positive market risk exposure. Consequently, investors optimally invest more in the stock market than without retirement flexibility. Both consumption and portfolio choice jump at the endogenous retirement date. The inability to borrow limits hedging and reduces the value of labor income, the wealth-to-wage ratio threshold for retirement, and the stock investment.
From an international perspective, Australia has been one of the leading jurisdictions for corporate governance reform. Its first corporate governance code predates the Cadbury Report, and Australia ...is also one of the few countries internationally to have been only marginally affected by the recession that ensued after the Global Financial Crisis. Considerable governance reform has occurred since 2007–8 in Australia, however; much of it occasioned by pressure brought to bear by institutional investors as a reaction to both traditional governance failings and also social and environmental concerns such as a growing awareness of climate change. Institutional influence is primarily associated with the compulsory retirement income system that emerged in the 1980s in light of an economy‐wide union campaign. While governance structures are becoming more homogenous, institutional logics reflecting trustees’ concerns are driving and shaping this ongoing process. A new approach to corporate engagement has emerged under the influence of investor representative bodies such as the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors that is driving corporate governance change.
In policy debates it is commonly claimed that older workers are entering a period of choice and control. In contrast, Guy Standing's book The Precariat: The Dangerous New Class, published in 2011, ...argues that older people are increasingly joining the ‘precariat’, by taking low-level jobs to supplement dwindling pension incomes. We argue that many older workers, not just those in ‘precarious jobs’, feel a sense of ‘ontological precarity’. Pressures to work longer, combined with limited alternative employment prospects and inadequate retirement incomes, give rise to a heightened sense of precarity. We develop a new theoretical model for understanding precarity as a lived experience, which is influenced by the intersection between precarious jobs, precarious welfare states and precarious households. This model is then illustrated using qualitative research from two organisations in the United Kingdom: ‘Local Government’ and ‘Hospitality’. In both organisations, older workers experienced a sense of ontological precarity because they worried about the long-term sustainability of their jobs and saw limited alternative sources of retirement income. Household circumstances either reinforced interviewees’ sense of precarity, or acted as a buffer against it. This was particularly important for women, as they typically accrued smaller financial resources in their own right. Our concluding discussion builds on this more advanced theoretical understanding of older worker precarity to call for a rethinking of state and employer support for decisions around later-life working and retirement.
Amidst public debate about the need for migrant domestic workers to assist with eldercare in Asia, we hear little about the futures of the workers themselves. This paper focuses on low-wage migrant ...domestic workers of different nationalities who have spent decades in Singapore, and how they imagine, prepare for, or avoid discussion of their aging futures. Singapore’s immigration regime enforces mandatory retirement and return migration when domestic workers reach 60 years old. These impending displacements evoke mixed emotions as migrant women re-evaluate questions of care, home, and the relationships they have developed with employers, kin back home, and communities abroad. In this paper, I explore how temporal borders operate alongside spatial borders to shape migrant women’s futures, illuminating uneven intersections between citizenship, gender, and care over the lifecourse. I further trace how the women navigate, ignore, push back, and bridge the anticipated ruptures of temporal borders.
In this paper we propose an approach to investigate a model of consumption and investment with a mandatory retirement date and early retirement option; we analyze properties of the optimal strategy ...and thereby contribute to understanding the interaction between retirement, consumption, and portfolio decisions in the presence of both the important features of retirement. In particular, we provide a characterization of the threshold of wealth as a function of time, and we show that it is strictly decreasing near the mandatory retirement date. The threshold is similar to the early exercise boundary of an American option in the sense that if the agent’s wealth is above or equal to the threshold level, then the agent immediately retires. We also provide comparative static analysis.
Drawing on the sociological literature of state bureaucracy, we develop a political incentive perspective on FDI inflows. We argue that political term, as a core feature of career advancement in ...state bureaucracy, influences the incentives of newly appointed government officials and in turn their efforts toward achieving the state’s goal of attracting FDI. Due to the mandatory retirement age which limits the career advancement, officials in their first terms perceive that they have better chances of promotion and hence have stronger incentives to work toward advancement than those continuing to serve in the current position for the following term. We test this argument by examining Chinese city government leaders and FDI inflows in their cities from 2003 to 2010, using a difference-in-differences design. The results show that first-term leaders, who are newly appointed after political turnover, attract more FDI inflows than continuing leaders. The difference is smaller when the new leaders are close to retirement, but greater if they are appointed to cities with low prior GDP performance. This study offers a new perspective on intra-country FDI variations, and extends the literature on the role of political institutions by investigating the political incentives of government officials.
Beginning in 2016, all couples in China were allowed to have two children without any restrictions. This paper provides population and economic projections under five shared socioeconomic pathways ...(SSPs) and three fertility policies. By replacing the one‐child policy with the two‐child policy, the population is predicted to continue growing until 2025–2035, with a peak of approximately 1.39–1.42 billion, and then to decline under four SSPs, with the exception of the fragmented world SSP3. As a result, the two‐child policy will lead to mitigation of the pressure from labor shortages and aging problems to a certain extent. In addition, an increase in working‐age people with higher education level relative to projections based on the one‐child policy will lead to an increase in gross domestic product by approximately 38.1–43.9% in the late 21st century. However, labor shortages and aging problems are inevitable, and the proportion of elderly in China will be greater than 14% and 21% by approximately 2025 and 2035, respectively. Full liberalization of fertility is expected to reduce the share of elderly people by 0.7–1.0% and to lead to an increase in gross domestic product by 5.3–6.7% relative to the two‐child policy in the late 21st century. The full liberalization of fertility policies is recommended, supplemented by increases in pension and child‐rearing funds, improvement in the quality of health services for females and children, and extension of compulsory education to meet the needs of an aged society.
Plain Language Summary
The one‐child policy in China has been replaced by the two‐child policy since 2016. What might the population and economy change if the one‐child policy is continued in the 21st century? What can China benefit from the fertility policy changes? Is it necessary to allow people to choose their family size in China? We conducted multipopulation policies and multisocioeconomic development pathways combined analysis to explore the effects of fertility policy changes on population and economy in China. We found that population size by the late 21st century might be 28% less than that in 2010 at the one‐child policy, and share of elderly (aged 65+) might be 49%. The implementation of the two‐child policy can mitigate the labor shortages and aging problems to a certain extent, and the increased working‐age population with higher education level can lead to a 38.1–43.9% increase in gross domestic product in the late 21st century. A further 0.7–1.0% reduction in elderly share of the total population and 5.3–6.7% increase in gross domestic product is projected in the late 21st century at the “full relaxation” policy. We believe that introduction of effects from fertility policy changes on socioeconomy can deliver useful information to decision makers.
Key Points
The integrated effects of population policies and socioeconomic pathways on the population structure and economy are explored
The population bust in China caused by the one‐child policy will be relieved after the two‐child policy, as indicated by all the SSPs
Full relaxation of fertility control is recommended with the simultaneous implementation of other social policies (e.g., pension funds)
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