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The dilemma of dual adaptation to delayed retirement initiative and work model change of gig economy: the influence of late retirement and multiple-job holding on mental health among older workers

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Abstract

Purpose

A growing number of older workers engage in multiple jobs in the context of delayed retirement initiative and the fast-growing gig economy in China. However, it remains unclear whether multiple jobs holding is beneficial to late retirees.

Methods

To preliminarily address this issue, this study applies the data of CHARLS-2015 to examine the effect of late retirement and multiple-job holding on mental health among older adults. Besides, instrumental variables (IVs) regression is conducted to clarify potential endogeneity problem.

Results

It is shown that both late retirement (coef. = − 2.726, p < 0.01) and multiple-job holding (coef. = − 1.523, p < 0.01) alleviate depression among older adults. However, multiple-job holding would weaken the relationship between late retirement and depression (coef. = 2.019, p < 0.01).

Conclusion

The findings suggest that although the modest engagement in late careers and multiple-job holding could benefit mental health, respectively, the overlap of them could be overburdened for older adults. Policymakers should be aware of the occupational risk of multiple-job holding when incentivizing the delayed retirement to address the population aging.

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Availability of data and materials

The data used in this study are open source and publicly available. The data were available upon reasonable request via online application to the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) research program.

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Acknowledgements

We sincerely thanked the CHARLS research team, Open Research Data Platform, Institute for Social Science Survey, National School of Development, Peking University who conducted the national random stratified sampling and publicized their research data. We also thanked participants of seminars for providing valuable advices to improve this manuscript.

Funding

We appreciate the support from National Social Science Fund of China (20CTY017).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Tourism Management, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Bocong Yuan & Tong Zhang

  2. Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, China

    Jiannan Li

Authors
  1. Bocong Yuan
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  2. Tong Zhang
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  3. Jiannan Li
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Contributions

YB conceptualized the manuscript and was responsible for the formal analysis; ZT was responsible for the writing—original article (partial), LJ was responsible for the writing—original article (partial), writing—review and editing; all the authors have read and approved the submission.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jiannan Li.

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Conflict of interest

The authors of this study had no competing interest to declare.

Ethical approval

The ethical approval and informed consent were not necessary as this study used publicly available data from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) and authors had no contact to human-related materials. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applied to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Besides, the CHARLS research team obtained ethics approval (license numbers: IRB00001052–11015, IRB00001052–14030, and IRB00001052–17053) from the institutional review board of the Peking University National School of Development.

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All respondents provided written informed consent. If the respondent was illiterate, he/she would press the fingerprint after the interviewer dictated the content of the informed consent.

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Yuan, B., Zhang, T. & Li, J. The dilemma of dual adaptation to delayed retirement initiative and work model change of gig economy: the influence of late retirement and multiple-job holding on mental health among older workers. Int Arch Occup Environ Health 95, 1067–1078 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00420-021-01830-8

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