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...

The many facets of retirement have been studied widely by economists. However, the effect of retirement on marriage stability has been ignored in the literature. Retirement represents a dramatic change in individual time allocation that may affect marriage stability. In particular, individuals...

A significant literature in the social sciences addresses the impact of child-bearing and rearing on marital stability and on mothers' labour market outcomes. Much less is known about older mothers' employment and marriage patterns when the adult children leave the parental nest. This study aims...

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...

We argue that retirement from work may affect marital status according to the predictions of quite standard economic models of marriage and divorce. Retirement may make singles less marriageable as well as impacting negatively marriage stability for married people. We exploit retirement laws in...

Earlier studies conclude that spouses time their retirement closely together. Here, we exploit early retirement age legislation to identify the effect of own and spousal retirement on spouses' hours of work. The sample for the analysis includes over 85000 French couples. We conclude that hours...

The economic litterature on retirement argues that individuals in a couple tend to retire at a choice time because of externalities in leisure. Ealier studies dit not investigate the extent to which partners actually spend more leisure time together upon retiring. Exploiting the law on early...

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...

In the literature on partners' joint retirement decisions one of the explanations for joint retirement is externalities in leisure. Exploiting the law on early retirement age in France, we use a regression discontinuity approach to identify the causal effect of retirement on hours of leisure,...

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...