Retirement Patterns of Couples in Europe

Laura Hospido and Gema Zamarro

No 7926, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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 directly 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 significative joint retirement effect for women of 21 percentage points. For men, the estimated effect is insignificant. 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: social security incentives; joint retirement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 D10 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2014-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-eur and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Published - published in: IZA Journal of European Labor Studies, 3:12, 2014

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Journal Article: Retirement patterns of couples in Europe (2014)
Working Paper: Retirement patterns of couples in Europe (2013)
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