AGING

Aging

Aging

The relationships among work, health, and retirement are instances of the more general association between individual capacity and role performance. Occupational and economic roles, including leisure consumption, want healthy capable occupants. Individuals, for their part, favor roles that conserve physical and emotional well-being. Health, therefore, figures significantly in the allocation processes that operate to convert cohorts of older workers into retirees (Weiss, 2005).

The two major empirical questions in this area are, first, how health affects the decision to work or retire and, second, how retirement affects health. Research findings about these matters might not always be consistent because the definition of ...