Later retirement, job strain, and health: evidence from the new State Pension age in the United Kingdom

Summary

This paper examines the impact of raising the State Pension age on women's health. Exploiting a UK pension reform that increased women's State Pension age for up to 6 years since 2010, we show that raising the State Pension age leads to an increase of up to 12 percentage points in the probability of depressive symptoms, alongside an increase in self‐reported medically diagnosed depression among women in a lower occupational grade. Our results suggest that these effects are driven by prolonged exposure to high‐strain jobs characterised by high demands and low control. Effects are consistent across multiple subcomponents of the General Health Question and Short‐Form‐12 (SF‐12) scores, and robust to alternative empirical specifications, including “placebo” analyses for women who never worked and for men.