TY  - JOUR
AU  - Coile, Courtney
AU  - Milligan, Kevin S
AU  - Wise, David A
TI  - Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from the U.S.
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 21940
PY  - 2016
Y2  - January 2016
DO  - 10.3386/w21940
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21940
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21940.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Courtney Coile
Department of Economics
Wellesley College
106 Central Street
Wellesley, MA  02481
Tel: 781/283-2408
Fax: 781/283-2177
E-Mail: ccoile@wellesley.edu

Kevin S. Milligan
Vancouver School of Economics
University of British Columbia
6000 Iona Drive
Vancouver, BC V6T 1L4
CANADA
E-Mail: kevin.milligan@ubc.ca

David A. Wise
NBER
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA   02138
E-Mail: dwise72037@aol.com
M1  - published as Courtney Coile, Kevin Milligan, David A. Wise. "Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from the United States," in David A. Wise, editor, "Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: The Capacity to Work at Older Ages" University of Chicago Press (2017)

M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2016-03-29
M3  - presented at "International Social Security Project", May 21-23, 2015
AB  - Public programs that benefit older individuals, such as Social Security and Medicare, may be changed in the future in ways that reflect an expectation of longer work lives.  But do older Americans have the health capacity to work longer?  This paper explores this question by asking how much older individuals could work if they worked as much as those with the same mortality rate in the past or as much as their younger counterparts in similar health.  Using both methods, we estimate that there is significant additional capacity to work at older ages.  We also explore whether there are differences in health capacity across education groups and whether health has improved more over time for the highly educated, using education quartiles to surmount the challenge of changing levels of education over time.
ER  -