Retirement in a Family Context: A Structural Model for Husbands and Wives

摘要

This paper specifies and estimates a structural model of the retirement decisions of husbands and wives. The feature of the data that is of central interest to us is the tendency of husbands and wives to retire together. An econometric approach is developed for estimating preferences of both spouses jointly and is implemented using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women (NLS), a survey that provides the most recent data available for a joint retirement study. Alternative specifications of joint decision making are tested, and the importance of various sources of interdependence in decision making are investigated.