The effect of retirement on social relationships: new evidence from SHARE

Simona Comi, Elena Cottini and Claudio Lucifora ()

No def088, DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE)

Abstract: We analyze the causal effect of retirement on the size, composition and intensity of social relationships using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe for 11 European countries. Our empirical strategy exploits the different retirement eligibility ages as instruments for the endogenous individuals’ retirement decisions and controls for time invariant individual characteristics. We show that retirement changes the composition of the individual’s social network, increasing the share of family members, and decreasing the share of colleagues and friends, while there is no effect on the network’s absolute size. Changes in the social network’s composition are associated with a higher overall satisfaction and more intense relationships. We argue that retirement induces a substitution between weak (friends or colleagues) and strong ties (family), along with an increase in the intensity of the surviving ties. Interestingly this substitution has a gender dimension: females mainly reduce the share of friends while males that of colleagues.

Keywords: retirement; social relationships; emotional closeness; ageing. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 J14 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur, nep-lma and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/economia-finanza-def088.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

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:ctc:serie1:def088

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Simone Moriconi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).