The risks of the profession: employment of seniors, health and anticipation.

Summary This thesis empirically studies different facets of senior citizens' behaviors in the context of an individualization of retirement choices linked to reforms of the old-age insurance systems. The first two chapters are analyses of the impact of work on health where I use the reforms of the French general pension scheme as exogenous shocks. Health is evaluated on two criteria: well-being (physical, mental, social) and mortality. I show the harmful effects of work on physical health and that it increases mortality. However, the nature and magnitude of the effects are very heterogeneous according to gender, education or income level. Less educated people suffer more physical damage from work, and women improve their sociability more than men after retirement. Working time during life increases mortality for men with the lowest pensions (less than 954 euros per month), while other income groups are more affected by retirement age. The third chapter compares the rigidity of employment rates of older workers in the face of pension reforms in OECD countries. Without any real causal link, pension reforms aimed at increasing the employment of older workers are much more effective when labour relations are considered harmonious. Moreover, the rigidity of employment is accompanied by a strong dispersion of opinions on this issue within the population. The origin of the heterogeneities in behavior must be analyzed. The fourth chapter focuses on one of them: differences in the experiences of older workers with economic shocks. I show that economic growth during childhood makes people more optimistic about the future of the US economy. The sons of the unemployed are more pessimistic than the rest of the population about their own future in the labor market. This pessimism is not justified because they are less likely to be fired from their jobs. In addition, they are more risk-averse and uncertain as they are less likely to invest their capital in the financial markets and more likely to frame their inheritance through the writing of a will. Sufficiently high unemployment benefits reduce or even cancel this phenomenon.