TY - JOUR AU - Banks, James AU - Emmerson, Carl AU - Tetlow, Gemma TI - Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from the United Kingdom JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 21980 PY - 2016 Y2 - February 2016 DO - 10.3386/w21980 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21980 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21980.pdf N1 - Author contact info: James Banks Arthur Lewis Building-3.020 School of Social Sciences The University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL United Kingdom E-Mail: j.banks@ifs.org.uk Carl Emmerson Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgemount Street London WC1E 7AE ENGLAND E-Mail: cemmerson@ifs.org.uk Gemma C. Tetlow Institute for Government 2 Carlton Gardens London SW1Y 5AA United-Kingdom E-Mail: gemma.tetlow@gmail.com M1 - published as James Banks, Carl Emmerson, Gemma Tetlow. "Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from the United Kingdom," 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) M3 - presented at "International Social Security Project", May 21-23, 2015 AB - This paper estimates how much additional work capacity there might be among men and women aged between 55 and 74 in the United Kingdom, given their health, and how this has evolved over the last decade. The objective is not to suggest how much older people should work but rather to shed light on how much ill-health (as opposed to other constraints and preferences) constrains older individuals’ ability to work. We present two alternative methods, both of which rely on constructing a ‘counterfactual’ employment rate for older people based on the behaviour of other similarly healthy individuals. Both methods suggest that there is significant additional capacity to work among older men and women, but that this has been declining over recent years for women (and possibly also for men). This latter finding suggests that the increase in employment rates among older people seen over the last decade are more rapid than would have been expected based on the improvements seen in health alone. ER -