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Automation may destroy jobs and change the labour demand structure, thereby potentially impacting workers' health and well-being. Using French individual survey data, we estimate the effects of working in automatable jobs on mental health. Implementing propensity score matching to solve the issue of endogenous exposure to automation risk, we find that workers whose job is at risk of automation in the future are about 4 pp more likely to suffer at present from severe mental disorders. Fear of job loss within the year and fear of qualification or occupational changes seem relevant channels to explain our findings.

Increasing the minimum retirement age is a widespread option chosen by policy makers to reduce spending in financially constrained public pension systems. Yet the effectiveness of such a reform strongly depends on the ability of the impacted individuals to postpone their withdrawal from the labor force. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of the 2010 French pension reform that increased the statutory eligibility age of retirement from 60 to 62. To do so, we use a differences-in-differences methodology, comparing the trajectories from work to retirement for succeeding generations facing a different statutory age. Using a detailed social security administrative database, we provide a global assessment of the effects of the reform, accounting for the potential substitution effects from old-age insurance towards unemployment, sickness or disability insurance schemes. Our findings suggest that despite a sizable effect on the employment rate, the reform also strongly in- creased unemployment and disability rates. These substitution effects largely reduce the impact of the reform: our estimates suggest that around one fifth in the decrease in public spending is offset by increasing expenses in other public insurance schemes.