Documents Debrand, Thierry 5 results

"Working conditions have greatly evolved in recent decades in developed countries. This evolution has been accompanied with the appearance of new forms of work organisation that may be sources of stress and health risk for older workers. As populations are ageing, these issues are particularly worrying in terms of the health, labour force participation and Social Security expenditure.
This paper focuses on the links between quality of employment and the health of older workers, using the Share 2004 survey. Our research is based on two classical models: the Demand-Control model of Karasek and Theorell (1991) and the Effort-Reward Imbalance model of Siegrist (1996), which highlight three main dimensions: Demand that reflects perceived physical pressure and stress due to a heavy work load; Control that refers to decision latitude at work and the possibilities to develop new skills; and Reward that corresponds to the feeling of receiving a correct salary relatively to efforts made, of having prospects for personal progress and receiving deserved recognition. These models also take into account the notion of support in difficult situations at work and the feeling of job security.
Our estimations show that the health status of older workers is related to these factors. Fairly low demand levels and a good level of reward are associated with a good health status, for both men and women. Control only influences the health status of women. Lastly, the results reveal the importance on health of a lack of support at work and the feeling of job insecurity; regardless of gender; these two factors are particularly related to the risk of depression. Thus health status and working conditions are important determinants of the labour force participation of older workers."

"Individual preferences concerning retirement age are strongly differentiated both within and between countries. According to the Share survey, the proportion of workers aged from 50 to 65 who wished to retire as soon as possible in 2004 ranged from 31% in the Netherlands to 67% in Spain. Such a preference for early retirement can depend on both financial and non financial factors. Non financial factors include working conditions, health status and mortality expectations. Economic or “monetary” factors essentially correspond to the magnitude of pension entitlements and how they depend upon retirement age. Entitlements that depend positively on retirement age should reduce the motivation to retire as soon as possible.
This paper compares the role of these different factors by combining individual data from the Share survey with macroeconomic indicators of pension entitlements recently produced by the OECD. Health and work conditions come out as strong determinants of the preference for early retirement. Being generally satisfied with one's work leads to a drop of approximately 16 percentage points in the probability of wishing to retire as soon as possible. Declaring oneself in bad or very bad health has a positive effect on this probability of a comparable order of magnitude. However, these non financial factors do not significantly contribute to the explanation of cross-country differentials. Conversely, financial factors seem to have a lower impact at micro-level, but a higher one for the explanation of cross-country differentials."