Health and Labor Supply of the Elderly in the City of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Elisenda Rentería, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Simone Wajnman, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

This article investigates the determinants of labor force participation of elderly men and women in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2000. The study pays special attention to the influence of health status on labor force participation. There are specified two models to analyze these determinants of the labor force participation, one with the probability of being in the labor force and another modeling the number of hours working per week. The dataset used in this study is the SABE, a survey on Health, Well-Being, and Aging in Latin American and the Caribbean of persons aged 60 and older. To control the endogeneity between health and labor force participation it is used here the Instrumental variable method. Further more, it was used different measures of health, one more subjective and two more objective, in order to analyze different effects of the elderly´s health condition into the labor supply.