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This paper analyses the effect of retirement on the familiarity with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) of older individuals. We argue that inability to cope with ICT might represent a threat for older individuals’ social inclusion. To account for the potential endogeneity of retirement with respect to familiarity with ICT, we instrument retirement decision with the age-eligibility for early and statutory retirement pension schemes. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we show that retirement reduces the computer literacy and the frequency of internet utilization for men and women. This finding is robust to the inclusion as control factors of health, cognition and social network indicators, which the literature has shown to be affected by retirement. Overall, the reduction in the familiarity with ICT after retirement tends to be stronger in the long-run.

We study whether mothers’ labor supply is shaped by the gender role attitudes of their peers. Using detailed information on a sample of UK mothers with dependent children, we find that having peers with gender-egalitarian norms leads mothers to be more likely to have a paid job and to have a greater share of the total number of paid hours worked within their household, but has no sizable effect on hours worked. Most of these effects are driven by less educated women. A new decomposition analysis allows us to estimate that approximately half of the impact on labor force participation is due to women conforming gender role attitudes to their peers’, with the remaining half being explained by the spillover effect of peers’ labor market behavior. These findings suggest that an evolution towards gender-egalitarian attitudes promotes gender convergence in labor market outcomes. In turn, a careful dissemination of statistics on female labor market behavior and attitudes may facilitate this evolution.

This paper analyzes the effect of work disability on the job involvement of workers aged 50–65 living in Europe. We elicit a measure of job involvement from a question asking respondents to think about their job and declare whether they would like to retire as early as they can. We exploit objective health indicators and anchoring vignettes to enhance the comparability across individuals of work disability self-assessments. Individuals’ evaluations of their health-related work limitations are found to be mildly affected by justification bias but to depend on individual heterogeneity in reporting behaviour. Work disability significantly reduces the job involvement of workers. After controlling for individual fixed-effects and an extensive set of time-varying covariates, moving from the first to the third quartile of the work disability distribution is associated with a 8% increase (4 percentage points) in the probability of desiring to retire as soon as possible. The effect is larger for blue-collar workers. Justification bias and heterogeneity in reporting behaviour do not alter the magnitude of these effects. 1

This paper analyzes the relationship between dispositional optimism and stock investments, controlling for cognitive skills and personality traits such as trust, social interactions and risk aversion. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) on investors aged 50+ in twelve European countries. Our results show that dispositional optimism and personality matter for financial decisions. Optimism is positively and significantly related to both the ownership of stocks and the share of gross financial wealth invested in these assets and its role is especially relevant for risk tolerant investors and investors with little trust in others.

Based on a sample of university students, we provide evidence that a small-scale training intervention has both a statistically and economically significant effect on subjective and objective assessments of financial knowledge. We also show that the intervention increases self-assessed more than actual financial knowledge. The intervention consists of measuring financial literacy before and after a small on-line course and is administered through an on-line platform.

We present novel estimates of Social Security Wealth (SSW) at the individual level based on the SHARE survey. Our estimates are based on a rigorous methodology taking into account country-specific legislations, the earnings history and the longevity prospects of individuals. The key advantage over existing estimates is that our measures of SSW is fully comparable across countries. This allows us to construct several indexes of the redistribution enacted by the pension systems in Europe. Moreover, simple correlations between SSW and alternative measures of private wealth are presented to provide descriptive evidence of the displacement effect of SSW on private wealth.

In this paper we investigate how age affects the self-reported level of life satisfaction among the elderly in Europe. By using a vignette approach, we find evidence that age influences life satisfaction through two counterbalancing channels. On the one hand, controlling for the effects of all other variables, the own perceived level of life satisfaction increases with age. On the other hand, given the same true level of life satisfaction, older respondents are more likely to rank themselves as "dissatisfied" with their life than younger individuals. Detrimental health conditions and physical limitations play a crucial role in explaining scale biases in the reporting style of older individuals.

Descriptive evidence shows that there is large cross-country variation in self-reported work disability rates of the elderly in Europe. In this paper we analyse whether these differences are genuine or they just reflect heterogeneity in reporting styles. To shed light on the determinants of work-disability differentials across countries, we combine a wide set of individuals' socioeconomic and health status characteristics with macro-economic indicators describing the institutional background of the country of residence.

Summary We investigate the role of response consistency in the dynamics of reporting work disability. Using the 2004 and 2006 waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we document that in Europe surprisingly large fractions of individuals change their self-reported disability status within 2 years. We find that these dynamics can be largely explained by the fact that respondents change the way that they evaluate the severity of work disability problems over time.

Parental socio-economic background plays an important role in determining employment outcomes during the individual’s whole life-cycle. Indeed, the environment in which individuals grow up plays a crucial role in determining their later socio-economic condition, regardless of their own abilities. On the one hand, this link might be due to the transmission of social norms (e.g. work ethics) or risk attitudes from parents to children. On the other hand, public policies may strengthen or weaken cross-generational persistence in the socio-economic status.

Limited use of financial markets is associated with financial distress later in life (Angelini et al. 2009). Such limited use may be the result of choice, or, more likely, it may be due to some impediment.