Pappa Ante Portas: The Retired Husband Syndrome in Japan

Marco Bertoni and Giorgio Brunello

No 8350, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The "Retired Husband Syndrome", that affects the mental health of wives of retired men around the world, has been anecdotally documented but never formally investigated. We use Japanese micro data and the exogenous variation generated by the 2006 revision of the Japanese Elderly Employment Stabilization Law, which mandated employers to guarantee continuous employment between mandatory retirement age and full pension eligibility age, to estimate the causal effect of the husband's retirement on the wife's mental health. We find that adding one year to the time spent in retirement by Japanese husbands increases the probability that their wives develop the syndrome by 5.8 to 13.7 percentage points, depending on the empirical specification. We discuss mechanisms at work and argue that – ceteris paribus – increasing female labour force participation might exacerbate rather than attenuate the phenomenon.

Keywords: stress; couples; pension reforms; retirement; depression; Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 I1 I3 J14 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published - published: Social Science and Medicine, 2017, 175, 135 - 142

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Working Paper: Pappa Ante Portas: The Retired Husband Syndrome in Japan (2014)
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