Retirement and Home Production: A Regression Discontinuity Approach

Journal article: Existing studies show that individuals who retire replace some private consumption with home production, but do not consider joint behavior of couples. Here we analyze the causal effect of retirement of each partner on hours of home production for both partners in a couple. Our identification strategy exploits the earliest age retirement laws in France, enabling a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach. We find that own retirement significantly increases own hours of home production and the effect is larger for men than for women. Moreover, retirement of the female partner significantly reduces male hours of home production but not vice versa.

Author(s)

Elena Stancanelli, Arthur van Soest

Journal
  • American Economic Review
Date of publication
  • 2012
Keywords JEL
D13 J14 J26
Keywords
  • Production domestique
Pages
  • 600-605
Version
  • 1
Volume
  • 102