Spousal Health Shocks and the Timing of the Retirement Decision in the Face of Forward-Looking Financial Incentives

Courtney Van Houtven () and Norma Coe

Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from Center for Retirement Research

Abstract: A long and still growing strand of the retirement literature examines the role financial incentives play in the timing of the retirement decision. A more recent second strand of work has focused on the role of health shocks in the retirement decision. This paper combines these two components of the literature in order to measure the marginal impact of current wealth (including pension accrual), forward-looking financial incentives (peak-value pension wealth), and health shocks on married individuals’ retirement decision. This paper helps to clarify whether previously omitted forward-looking financial incentives can explain the strong role attributed to health shocks in the retirement decisions of coupled individuals. We find that financial incentives are the most important determinant of retirement behavior empirically. A husband is about half as responsive to his wife’s financial incentives as he is to his own. Interestingly, we find that married men are responsive to their wives’ health shocks, on both the intensive and extensive margin, but find wives’ decisions concerning work are largely unaffected by their husbands’ health shocks.

Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2010-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/spousal-health-sh ... inancial-incentives/ (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/spousal-health-shocks-and-the-timing-of-the-retirement-decision-in-the-face-of-forward-looking-financial-incentives/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/spousal-health-shocks-and-the-timing-of-the-retirement-decision-in-the-face-of-forward-looking-financial-incentives/)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2010-6

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from Center for Retirement Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Grzybowski () and Christopher F Baum ().