Thompson Rivers University

Retirement and mental health in Canada

December 14, 2012

Retirement PlanCanada experienced a baby boom in the 20 years after World War II and a considerable number of people will retire in the coming years. Consequently, retired people will soon constitute a significant part of Canadian population. In this context, an interesting question is how retirement impacts mental health. Dr. Latif Associate Professor of Economics at TRU used Canadian Longitudinal data, to examine the impact of retirement on mental health as measured by the short form depression scale. After controlling for unobserved individual specific heterogeneity, the study found that retirement has an insignificant impact on depression. As a robustness check, the study utilized sophisticated statistical techniques to reconfirm that retirement has an insignificant impact on depression. The study further examined this issue using different subgroups based on gender, education and marital status, and again found that impacts of retirement on depression were not statistically significant. This is a significant finding and encouraging for people thinking to retire. Dr. Latif’s research got published in a high impact peer reviewed journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics.

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