TY - JOUR AU - Blanchet, Didier AU - Caroli, Eve AU - Prost, Corinne AU - Roger, Muriel TI - Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages in France JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 22024 PY - 2016 Y2 - February 2016 DO - 10.3386/w22024 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22024 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22024.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Didier Blanchet INSEE 88 Avenue Verdier 92541 MONTROUGE CEDEX FRANCE E-Mail: didier.blanchet@insee.fr Eve Caroli PSL, University Paris Dauphine, LEDa-LEGOS, Paris School of Economics and IZA Place du Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny 75775 Paris Cedex 16 France E-Mail: eve.caroli@dauphine.psl.eu Corinne Prost E-Mail: prost@insee.fr Muriel Roger CES - Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne 106-112 boulevard de l'Hôpital 75013 Paris France Tel: 33 1 44 07 81 36 E-Mail: Muriel.Roger@univ-paris1.fr M1 - published as Didier Blanchet, Eve Caroli, Corinne Prost, Muriel Roger. "Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages in France," 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 - France stands out as a country with a low labor force attachment of older workers. A reversal in the trend of French labor participation rates over 50 is under way, partly due to the pension reforms that took place since 1993. The French ageing process is driven by large gains in life expectancy and Pension reforms allocate part of these gains to work rather than to retirement. The implicit assumptions guiding the reforms have been that additional years of life are years with a health status that can be considered reasonably compatible with work. If this is not the case, the idea of sharing these additional years of life between work and retirement is questionable. Considering mortality and health status, we question the fact that the reforms may have gone too far in increasing the retirement age. To tackle these issues, we rely on two different methodological approaches developed in the economic literature: one based on the gap in employment rates across time for given mortality rates; the other using the work/health relationship measured at certain ages to predict the health-related work capacity of older age groups at the same period of time. Both methods aim at providing measures of additional work capacity. This capacity may be defined as a measure of the distance between current retirement ages and what we call the “health barrier”, i.e. the age at which health prevents people from working longer. Both methods predict high average levels of additional work capacity. However, the picture becomes somewhat different when disaggregating the results by social groups or education. Our results emphasize the idea that policies aiming at activating any estimated additional work capacity should take into account, when possible, the heterogeneity of health conditions in the population. Moreover, additional work capacity cannot be a general indicator of how much seniors should work. The methods used here indeed leave aside many factors that determine the employment rate of older workers. ER -