Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks Noah Arman Kouchekinia, David Neumark & Tim A. Bruckner Share X LinkedIn Facebook Bluesky Threads Email Link Working Paper 35117 DOI 10.3386/w35117 Issue Date April 2026

With large gains in life expectancy, the population share of disability due to cognitive decline and dementia has substantially increased. Many older adults in the United States leave the workforce well before age 65. Correlational evidence suggests that leaving the workforce before retirement age could accelerate the pace of cognitive decline. We offer causal evidence, using HRS data for the United States, exploiting plausibly exogenous shifts in labor demand in local labor markets as a Bartik instrument for employment variation across these markets. We find substantial declines over time in cognitive scores stemming from negative labor demand shocks. These findings are concentrated among men aged 51 to 64, whose employment decisions and outcomes may be more sensitive to local labor market conditions than are these decisions or outcomes for women or for older men. Our evidence extends past work focusing narrowly on the retirement age window and provides further support to the notion that working to older ages may delay age-related cognitive decline.

• Acknowledgements and Disclosures

  We are grateful to the UCI Office of Research Seed Grant program and the Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy at UCI for project development research support. All views expressed are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

  
  
• Citation and Citation Data Copy Citation Noah Arman Kouchekinia, David Neumark, and Tim A. Bruckner, "Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks," NBER Working Paper 35117 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35117. Copy to Clipboard Download Citation

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Topics

Health, Education, and Welfare Health Labor Economics Demography and Aging

Programs

Economics of Aging Economics of Health Labor Studies Public Economics

Working Groups

Cohort Studies

Projects

Coordinating Center on the Economics of Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease-Related Dementias: Prevention, Treatment, and Care

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