Why Life Gets Better after Age 50, for Some
Study on mental well-being and the social norm of work by fellows Coen van de Kraats (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Titus Galama (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and University of Southern California, United States), Maarten Lindeboom (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and alumnus Zichen Deng (University of Amsterdam) is forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics.
For decades, the idea of a “happiness U-curve” has shaped how we think about aging and well-being: happiness dips in midlife, bottoms out in the 40s or 50s, and then rises again in later years. But this new study challenges that simple narrative.
In their publication "Why Life Gets Better after Age 50, for Some: Mental Well-Being and the Social Norm of Work" they found that for unemployed men, mental health improves significantly after age 50, not because of aging or more leisure time, but because retirement becomes socially acceptable. As their peers in age retire and the social norm (expectation) of work weakens, the mental well-being of the unemployed improves. By contrast, the authors did not find evidence for mental health improvements among employed men, unemployed women, or those receiving disability benefits. These findings suggests that the U-shaped curve of well-being may not be a universal feature of aging, but rather a psychosocial phenomenon shaped by social norms and identity.
Using data on individuals aged 50+ from 10 European countries, they identified the social norm of work effect using exogenous variation in the earliest eligibility age for old-age public pensions across countries and birth cohorts. Mental distress among unemployed men dropped in the year after reaching their country’s and birth cohort’s early retirement age, but not before that, and the effect sizes increased in later years as more and more peers in age retired. This coincides with a shift in self-perception: as more peers retired, unemployed men increasingly began to see themselves as retired, too. On average, depression rates among unemployed men fell by 23 percentage points after reaching the early retirement age — a strikingly large effect, twice as big as the correlation between depression and being widowed.
Article citation
Coen van de Kraats, Titus Galama, Maarten Lindeboom, and Zichen Deng. 2025. "Why Life Gets Better after Age 50, for Some: Mental Well-Being and the Social Norm of Work," Journal of Labor Economics, forthcoming, doi.org/10.1086/737772.