Older Couples' Labour Market Reactions to Family Disruptions

David Haardt

Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers from McMaster University

Abstract: This paper analyses how spouses in older couples react to `shocks' or `surprises' in their partner's labour income using data from the British Household Panel Survey, 1991-2004. Wives' labour supply proves to be much more sensitive to shocks than husbands'. After a divorce or separation, wives reduce their labour supply while the effect on husbands' labour supply is positive or not statistically significant. If a wife becomes unemployed, it does not affect her husband's labour supply while wives whose husband becomes unemployed reduce their labour supply, too. A decline in husband's health causes the wife to reduce her working hours while husbands tend to increase their labour supply when facing a decline in wife's health. Partner's death does not have statistically significant labour supply effects. Negative income shocks due to other reasons (such as choice) tend to reduce partner's labour supply and vice versa, but only slightly.

Keywords: labour supply; income shocks; older couples; BHPS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J14 J16 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2007-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hap
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap198.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap198.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap198.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Older couples’ labour market reactions to family disruptions (2007)
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:mcm:sedapp:198

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers from McMaster University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().