The dynamics of retirement behavior in couples: Reduced-form evidence from England and the US ⁄

Abstract

In this paper we document and analyse the difierences in labour market outcomes for English and American couples using the 2002 and 2004 waves of ELSA and HRS. In particular, we look at couples’ retirement patterns, and how these are afiected by each country’s institutional settings, paying especial attention to the incentives implicit in social security systems. We use the institutional variation in age of entitlement to social security beneflts for women in the two countries -60 years in the UK and 62 in the US- to test in a difierence-in-difierences setting whether men’s transitions out of the labour force are sensitive to their wives’ incentives. We flnd that English men are more likely than their US counterparts to exit the labour force when their wives reach 60. We then regress men’s retirement indicator on their wife’s, instrumenting the latter with women’s exogenous retirement incentives. Again, we flnd signiflcant responses of men’s retirement to that of their wives. We interpret our results as evidence that men enjoy their retirement more if their wife is retired as well. Alternative explanations for the correlation in retirement outcomes may be present, but they cannot explain our results. This evidence of complementarity in spouses’ preference for leisure has important implications for policy analysis, as it implies that failure to account for cross-spouse in∞uences will yield inaccurate predictions of policy efiects.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.