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It is widely believed that
health plays a major role in retirement decisions. The most important problem
in including health in retirement models is the lack of availability of a good
measure of health at the individual level in existing data sets.
This problem is exacerbated
when a model spanning multiple countries is desired, because self-reports on
health may not be comparable across countries. Arguably, physical measures are
less influenced by cultural and linguistic differences than self-reports on
general health or even on health conditions.
The authors develop a cross-country
measurement model for health in which the relations between functional limitations,
self-reports, and physical measures like grip strength are used to construct
health indexes.
Comparability across countries
is achieved by using the physical measurements to define the measurement scales,
and allowing other parameters to vary across countries to account for cultural
and linguistic differences in response patterns.
The usefulness of the health
indexes is then investigated by including it in some simple retirement models.
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