Couples' Retirement under Individual Pension Design : A Regression Discontinuity Study for France

Retirement policies are individually designed but the majority of people of retirement age live as couples. We estimate the effects of a French pension reform on spouses' employment decisions. We use labor-force survey data, pooled over different years, on fifty thousand French couples and apply a regression discontinuity framework, also controlling for couple's unobserved heterogeneity. We conclude that the reform immediately reduced both spouses' retirement probability by about 2 percentage points each. The husband's retirement probability also drops by 4 percentage points if the wife is hit by the reform. Instrumenting spousal retirement with legal retirement age, own retirement probability correlates with a 2 to 3 percentage points increase in spousal retirement - and this holds true for both spouses