Household Consumption at Retirement: A Regression Discontinuity Study on French Data

Nicolas Moreau and Elena Stancanelli

No 7709, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Earlier literature has investigated the drop in household consumption upon retirement of the head of the household, the so-called "retirement consumption puzzle". Here, we expand on these studies by considering also retirement of the wife, thus distinguishing households in which the wife is a "housewife" from 'dual-earners'. We use a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effect of each partner's retirement on household consumption. We use for the analysis data drawn from the French Consumer Budget Survey 2001 that collected two-week expenditure diaries. We find a significant and sizable drop in food and clothes expenditure upon retirement of the male partner. However, the drop in food expenditure is not robust to specification checks and it becomes statistically insignificant when dropping from the sample couples in which the wife is a housewife.

Keywords: consumption; ageing; retirement; regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 D12 J14 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published - published in: Annals of Economics and Statistics, 2015, 117-118, 253-276

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7709.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Household Consumption at Retirement: A Regression Discontinuity Study on French Data (2015)
Working Paper: Household Consumption at Retirement: a Regression Discontinuity Study on French Data (2015)
Working Paper: Household Consumption at Retirement: a Regression Discontinuity Study on French Data (2015)
Working Paper: Household Consumption at Retirement: a Regression Discontinuity Study on French Data (2015)
Working Paper: Household Consumption at Retirement: A Regression Discontinuity Study on French Data (2013)
Working Paper: Household Consumption at Retirement: A Regression Discontinuity Study on French Data (2013)
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:iza:izadps:dp7709

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().