A new paper by researchers Márta Radó and Michaël Boissonneault examines the differences in subjective wellbeing in Hungarians 0-3 years and 8-11 years after voluntary and involuntary retirement. The authors use genetic matching to improve the comparability of these two subgroups and to adjust the conditions of a controlled experiment in which voluntary retirement is the treatment variable.
The results show that voluntary pensioners have a higher degree of subjective wellbeing than involuntary pensioners, not only in the short term, but also in the long term, which contradicts the researchers’ expectation that the two groups would converge over time.