Search

The pursuit of tourism activities represents an important contributor to individuals’ well-being in older age. While current generations of pensioners enjoy on average unprecedented levels of financial resources, a large amount of spare time, and often retire while still in good health, the onset of disability and financial constraints might hinder the pursuit of tourism. The paper uses data drawn from a large Italian population survey, “Perspectives on daily life”, and provides empirical evidence on the probability of undertaking tourism in older age and the role of personal charachteristics acting as triggers and barriers to tourism. Results indicate the existence of a strong socioeconomic gradient in tourism, with worse-off individuals less likely to undertake the activity. Also, disability represents a barrier to tourism, although lower for individuals living in a couple. Finally, sociability and engagement in reading act as triggers to tourism.

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 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.

We investigate the happiness variations associated with divorce by drawing data from a retrospective panel dataset based on the third wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and covering 14 European countries. This dataset proposes as a powerful tool to control for reporting style heterogeneity in happiness self-evaluations. Indeeda, in addition to individual fixed-effects, we control for full migration trajectories in order to remove bias in well-being evaluations produced by cross-country heterogeneity in the cultural norms and societal values individuals have been exposed during their life-cycle. Happiness is found to increase in the period after divorce for both men and women. We show that this pattern goes through a decrease in stress and financial hardship.

In this paper, we analyze the effect of work disability on the desire to retire as soon as possible of older workers. We exploit objective health indicators and anchoring vignettes to develop work disability measures enhancing the comparability across individuals of work disability self-assessments. Our results show that, even once controlling for individual fixed-effects, individuals experiencing work limiting health problems are found to have a stronger propensity to retire. The role of work disability in determining retirement intentions varies with earnings and job characteristics.

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.

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.