The Insurance Role of Household Labor Supply for Older Workers

Yanan Li and Victoria Prowse
Additional contact information
Yanan Li: Cornell University

Working Papers from University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center

Abstract: In this paper, we explore and compare how older and younger couple house- holds use adjustments in the wife’s labor supply to mitigate the e?ects of negative shocks to the husband’s employment status. Using di?erence-in-di?erences match- ing methods, we document a substantial added worker e?ect for younger house- holds. However, the wives of older men do not increase employment in response to their husbands’ negative employment shocks. Instead, in older households, fe- male unemployment increases. These results are consistent with older women being constrained by the labor market in the extent to which they can adjust their labor supply to mitigate the e?ects of spousal employment shocks. Our ?ndings suggest that spousal labor supply is not an e?ective intra-household insurance device for older households.

Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp309.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp309.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp309.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:mrr:papers:wp309

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MRRC Administrator ().