Mental Health News
A team of researchers at Binghamton University explored how early retirement accelerates cognitive decline in the elderly. The study is published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
The Study
To understand better how human capital depreciates over the life cycle, the researchers examined data from China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) and the Chinese Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS).
They assessed factors like pension benefits on individual cognition, episodic memory, components of intact mental status, dementia risk, etc.
The Findings
The results revealed that early retirement accelerates cognitive decline and memory problems. There are significant negative effects of pension benefits on cognition functioning among the elderly.
The researchers added: “We were surprised to find that pension benefits and retirement actually resulted in reduced cognitive performance. The fact that retirement led to reduced cognitive performance in and of itself is a stark finding about an unsuspected, puzzling issue, but a finding with extremely important welfare implications for one’s quality of life in old age.”
To Know More You May Refer To
Nikolov, P., & Hossain, M. S. (2023). Do pension benefits accelerate cognitive decline in late adulthood? Evidence from rural China. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 205, 594–617. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.11.025