Insurance Through Marriage: Case of Parental Health Shocks and Social Security Claiming

Neha Bairoliya (), Ray Miller () and Zhixiu Yu ()
Additional contact information
Neha Bairoliya: University of Southern California
Ray Miller: Colorado State University
Zhixiu Yu: Louisiana State University

No 2026-003, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: Unpaid parental caregiving often arrives when older workers make largely irreversible Social Security benefit claiming decisions. Using the Health and Retirement Study linked to Social Security administrative records, we examine how parental caregiving is related to claiming and labor supply. In married households, caregiving is associated with specialization: when one spouse provides care, the caregiver is 12 percentage points more likely to claim by age 64 and 11 percentage points less likely to work full time, while the non-caregiving spouse is about 10 percentage points less likely to claim early and 10 percentage points more likely to delay retirement. These patterns are robust to rich controls, individual fixed effects, subjective survival beliefs, and an instrumental-variables strategy using the presence of living parents and in-laws. Administrative benefit-type data further show that sole married caregivers are about 10 percentage points more likely to claim spousal benefits consistent with intra-household insurance through Social Security’s spousal provisions. We find no comparable effects of caregiving among non-married individuals. The results suggest that spousal benefits may buffer the retirement-income costs of family caregiving, and that reducing them could weaken this insurance channel.

Keywords: informal care; retirement; Marriage; insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H55 I14 J12 J14 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur and nep-lma
Note: M
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Bairol ... through-marriage.pdf First version March 4, 2026 (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:hka:wpaper:2026-003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().