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...

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...

Since 2008, France experiences a sharp productivity slowdown. Both output per hour and total factor productivity are particularly deceptive in the market economy. This recent trend contrasts with the acceleration of productivity during the previous crisis in the 1990's and the continuous...

We study the impact of income taxation on both partners' allocation of time to market work and unpaid house work in households with two adults. We estimate a structural household utility model in which the marginal utilities of leisure and house work of both partners are modelled as random...

Earlier studies conclude that spouses' retirement strategies are not independent from each other and that policies affecting individuals in a couple are also likely to affect the economic behaviour of their partner. In this study, we exploit retirement age legislation in France as well as a...

In the scant literature on partners' joint retirement decisions one of the explanations for joint retirement is externalities in leisure. In this study, we investigate how retirement affects the hours of leisure together of individuals in a couple. Exploiting the law on retirement age in France,...

Existing studies show that individuals who retire replace some private consumption by home production, but do not consider joint behaviour of couples. Here we analyze the causal effect of retirement of each partner on hours of home production of both partners in a couple. Our identification...

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...

Competitiveness differentials are blamed for the instability of the Eurozone. Most of the analyses focus on labour costs or labour-market institutions. This paper explores an additional source of differentials in competitiveness: land and building prices. European countries, especially France,...

This paper analyzes households' demand for time inputs to domestic services, modeling simultaneously the decision to purchase services in the market and the time spent on weekend and weekday days by each partner on routine household chores. By focusing on cleaning, laundry, and ironing, we...