Retirement Incentives and Couples' Retirement DecisionsCourtney Coile
NBER Working Paper No. 9496 The typical family in the US is now a dual-earner couple, yet relatively few studies examine the retirement decision in a household context. This paper explores how husbands' and wives' retirement behavior is influenced by their own financial incentives from Social Security and private pensions and by spillover effects' from their spouses' incentives. I find that men and women are similarly responsive to their own incentives. I further find that men are very responsive to their wives' incentives but that women are not responsive to their husbands' incentives and present evidence to suggest that this may be due to asymmetric complementarities of leisure. Policy simulations suggest that the omission of spillover effects will bias the estimated effect of changing Social Security policy on men's labor force participation. The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.
You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. Published: Coile, Courtney C. “Retirement Incentives and Couples’ Retirement Decisions.” Topics in Economic Analysis & Policy 4, 1 (2004): article 17. This paper is available as PDF (604 K) or via email.
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