Economics serving society

Partners’ Leisure Time Truly Together Upon Retirement

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Elena Stancanelli et Arthur van Soest

In the standard economic model, individual preferences for leisure time are considered as a determinant of time spent at work, in the same way as budgetary constraints, for example. According to orthodox economic theory, for couples, preferences for shared leisure time play a key role in their joint decisions, and in particular, they help to explain participation in the labour market, hours worked and also the choice to retire “together” (let us say, more or less in the same year). However, economists lack empirical data on the subject: is it possible to know whether couples actually adapt their working time and choice of when to retire depending on the amount of leisure time they do or will spend together?

In this article, Elena Stancanelli and Arthur van Soest use data from the INSEE study of time use for the period 1998-99. It is the first study that focuses on the way in which couples’ shared leisure time changes after retirement. The data are very detailed, making it possible to quantify the leisure hours that couples share, before and after retirement, in around forty different activities, including walking, going to the cinema, visiting friends and family, family dinners, simply watching television together, or doing separate activities but in the same place (reading books side by side, for example). The authors show that the leisure time of husbands increases spectacularly after retirement, which is not surprising, given that they are no longer employed. The amount of time that a husband spends doing household tasks also tends to increase after retirement. In addition, and also not surprisingly, shared leisure time among couples hardly increases at all after the husband’s retirement. Stancanelli and van Soest remind us that this situation is not marginal: indeed, in France, husbands are on average two years older than their wives and legal arrangements do not facilitate simultaneous retirement for couples where both are working. Generally, then, women must continue to work when their husbands retire. This article focuses on couples’ leisure time from the moment when both are retired, in order to estimate the complementarities of their leisure. They observe that when the wife retires, her personal leisure time increases, as does the leisure time shared with her husband. However, Stancanelli and van Soest stress that overall, the increase in shared leisure time is rather modest. Indeed, in their estimation, once retired, couples devote between 30 and 60 minutes more per day to shared activities than they did before retiring. Further research is required to know whether this degree of difference is sufficient to confirm that couples make work and retirement decisions jointly.


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Original title: “Partners’ Leisure Time Truly Together Upon Retirement”
Published in: IZA Journal of Labor Policy, June 2016
Available at: https://izajolp.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40173-016-0068-7

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