We follow individuals as they retire using discrete-time hazard models applied to a stock sample from 12 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. Results confirm that health shocks are a determinant of retirement age and are quantitatively more important than pension entitlement. This is the...

The number of people claiming Incapacity Benefit has remained fairly constant in recent years at around 2.7 million (7% of the working age population), although the numbers have trebled since the 1970s when an earlier version of this benefit was available. In January 2006 the UK Government set...

Debt problems in the UK have recently become much more severe, especially for the lowest income groups, and we examine here their impact on health, using data from the national Families´ and Children´s Survey (FACS). We model the relationship between debt and health as a simultaneous two-way...

This paper considers two societal concerns in addition to health maximisation: first, concerns for the societal value of lifetime health for an individual; and second, concerns for the value of lifetime health across individuals. Health-related social welfare functions (HRSWFs) have addressed...