TY - JOUR T1 - Late-career unemployment and cognitive abilities JF - Journal of Health Economics Y1 - 2022 A1 - Diana Freise A1 - Hendrik Schmitz A1 - Matthias Westphal KW - Cognitive abilities KW - Event studies KW - Mental Health KW - Plant closures KW - Unemployment AB - We study the effect of unemployment on cognitive abilities among individuals aged between 50 and 65 in Europe. To this end, we exploit plant closures and use flexible event-study estimations together with an experimentally elicited measure of fluid intelligence, namely word recall. We find that, within a time period of around eight years after the event of unemployment, cognitive abilities only deteriorate marginally – the effects are insignificant both in statistical and economic terms. We do, however, find significant effects of late-career unemployment on the likelihood to leave the labor force, and short-term effects on mental health problems such as depression and sleep problems. ER -