TY  - JOUR
AU  - Banks,James
AU  - Blundell,Richard
AU  - Bozio,Antoine
AU  - Emmerson,Carl
TI  - Disability, Health and Retirement in the United Kingdom
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17049
PY  - 2011
Y2  - May 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17049
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17049.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
James Banks
University College London
E-Mail: j.banks@ucl.ac.uk

Richard Blundell
University College London
Department of Economics
Gower Street
London, ENGLAND
E-Mail: r.blundell@ucl.ac.uk

Antoine Bozio
Institute for Fiscal Studies
7 Ridgemount Street
London WC1E 7AE ENGLAND
E-Mail: antoine_b@ifs.org.uk

Carl Emmerson
Institute for Fiscal Studies
7 Ridgemount Street
London WC1E 7AE ENGLAND
E-Mail: cemmerson@ifs.org.uk
M3  - presented at "International Social Security Conference", May 2, 2011
AB  - Over the last thirty years pathways to retirement have changed substantially in the UK. They have been dominated by spells of unemployment in the late 1970s, with then an increased importance of disability spells from the mid-1980s onwards. At the end of the period the direct route from work to retirement was increasingly more common. General economic conditions seem to have been important driving forces during the entire period. In contrast changes in health do not seem to provide convincing explanations for these trends: mortality has been falling over the period without any apparent link to the share of the population reporting ill health or disability or to the number claiming benefits. We also find evidence that recent reforms have had some impact. The halting of the previous growth in the rate of in-flow onto disability benefits in the mid-1990s coincided with the implementation of a major reform. Evidence from the pilots of the Pathways-to-Work programme in 2003-2005 suggests that those moving onto disability benefits moved off these benefits faster than they would otherwise have done as a direct result of the programme.
ER  -