TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hurd,Michael D.
TI  - The Joint Retirement Decision of Husbands and Wives
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 2803
PY  - 1988
Y2  - December 1988
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2803
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2803.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Michael D. Hurd
RAND Corporation
1776 Main Street
Santa Monica, CA 90407
Tel: 310/451-6945
Fax: 310/451-6923
E-Mail: mhurd@rand.org
M1  - published as Michael D. Hurd. "The Joint Retirement Decision of Husbands and Wives," in David A. Wise, editor, "Issues in the Economics of Aging" University of Chicago Press, 1990 (1990)

M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1989-03-01
AB  - The objective of the paper is to find empirically whether husbands and wives tend to retire at the same time, and to give an explanation of the findings. Similarity of retirement dates could be caused by similarity of tastes (assortative mating), by economic variables, or by the complimentarity of leisure. Each explanation would have different implications for the response of retirement to policy changes. Both simple data analysis and economic models of the age of retirement point to coordination of retirement dates: husbands and wives tend to retire at the same time. According to the results, very little of the coordination is due to economic variables, and simple cross-tabulations rule out assortative mating as an important explanation. This leaves complimentarity of leisure. Because of data limitations, this conclusion is, however, mainly qualitative. The data set is the Mew Beneficiary Survey.
ER  -