Abstract
This paper examines how workers change their health related behaviors, specifically smoking habit, after their retirement in Japan. Previous research across countries has analyzed the effects of retirement on health behaviors, which include various outcomes such as physical exercise and sleep duration. Most effects can be explained by opportunity costs in the health investment framework, however, the mechanism of a change in smoking habit has not been fully uncovered.
In present study, we test a hypothesis in which some people smoke in order to cope with stress, and thus they quit smoking when they are released from it after retirement. Using eight waves of the data from the Longitudinal Survey of Middle-aged and Elderly Persons in Japan, we investigate the effect of retirement on smoking habit with fixed-effect regression model. We include two dummy variables in our model, each of which denotes those who were not satisfied with their work content, and those who were not satisfied with their work-site interpersonal relation in the previous year in order to explore heterogeneous effect of retirement across two different groups according to stress.
Results show that retirement has statistically significant positive effect on smoking cessation among male workers. It is more likely for male workers who were not satisfied with their work-site interpersonal relationship to quit smoking after retirement than other workers. It is possible that stress hypothesis explains the behavioral change after retirement. It suggests that workers might postpone their smoke cessation when their work life is extended.