Retirement intentions of older migrant workers: does health matter?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of self‐assessed health on retirement plans of older migrants living in France. As immigration is primarily associated with labor considerations, the role of economic incentives in the migration decision suggests that health could play a minor effect in immigrants’ decision to retire.

Using detailed data on immigrants living in France collected in 2003, the authors examine the role of health on early retirement intentions using simultaneous, recursive models that account for the fact that subjective health is potentially endogenous.

It is found that being in poor health increases the intention of migrant workers to retire early, but the subjective health outcomes have little influence on retirement plans.

Since subjective health outcomes have less influence on retirement plan than economic variables, migrants may have incentives to postpone their retirement decisions in order to avoid an excessive pension reduction.

Knowing the relative contribution of health variables and economic factors in the context of migration is a challenging issue since in almost all industrialized countries, the proportion of migrants having retired or nearing retirement has increased substantially. The authors’ analysis is the first contribution to study the role of health on retirement intentions of older migrants.