Retirement of Spouses and Social Security Reform

Josef Falkinger, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer and Josef Zweimüller ()

No 855, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: The retirement decisions of spouses may be interdependent for various reasons: similarity of tastes, joint assets, sharing rules for income and housework, or complementarity of leisure. Because of data limitations, only a few empirical studies exist on this topic. From a policy point of view interdependent retirement could become important if legislators in different EC countries are forced to synchronize minimum retirement ages, which are lower now for females than males in a number of countries. In the theoretical part, the reaction of spouses to changes in the retirement age of their partners is analysed for typical family patterns. In the empirical part, the possibility of interdependent retirement is studied for Austrian data. The findings show an asymmetry: husbands react to changes in wives' legal minimum retirement age, wives don't react vice versa. The cross effect on men's participation rates -- resulting from a rise in women's minimum retirement age --is almost half as big as the first-round effect upon the women themselves.

Keywords: Family Labour Supply; Minimum Retirement Age; Retirement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 H55 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=855 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Retirement of spouses and social security reform (1996)
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:cpr:ceprdp:855

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/ ... pers/dp.php?dpno=855

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().