Retirement patterns of couples in Europe

Laura Hospido and Gema Zamarro

No 1317, Working Papers from Banco de España

Abstract: In this paper we study the retirement patterns of couples in a multi-country setting using data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe. In particular, we test whether women’s (men’s) transitions out of the labor force are causally related to the actual realization of their husbands’ (wives’) transition, using the institutional variation in country-specific early and full statutory retirement ages to instrument the latter. Exploiting the discontinuities in retirement behavior across countries, we find a significant joint retirement effect, especially for women, of around 16 to 18 percentage points. For men, we find a similar but less precise effect. Our empirical strategy allows us to give a causal interpretation to the effect we estimate. In addition, this effect has important implications for policy analysis.

Keywords: Joint retirement; Social security incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 D10 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://www.bde.es/f/webbde/SES/Secciones/Publicaci ... /13/Fich/dt1317e.pdf First version, November 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Retirement patterns of couples in Europe (2014)
Working Paper: Retirement Patterns of Couples in Europe (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bde:wpaper:1317

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