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...

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...

Increasing individual working lives to counter population ageing and public pension deficits is of utmost interest to policy makers today. Because over 70 percent of older individuals live in a couple, it is relevant to investigate spouses' retirement strategies. Earlier literature in this area...

Retirement represents a dramatic change in individual life that may also affect marriage stability, a fact which has been mostly ignored to date. Using observations on over 200,000 French men and over 166,000 French women aged 50 to 70, drawn from the French Labor Force Surveys over the last...

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,...

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...

Children can be considered as a marriage-specific investment that increases the value of the marriage, making a divorce more costly. We exploit the richness of pre- and post-marital information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79, for the United States, to investigate the relation...

This paper analyzes the time allocation of Italian spouses to paid work, childcare and household work. The literature suggests that Italian husbands contribute the least to unpaid household work, relative to other European countries, while Italian women have the lowest market employment rates....

This paper is focused on couple households where the wife is the main earner. The economic literature on this subject is particularly scant. According to our estimates, the wife was the main earner in one of every six couple households in France in 2002, including wife-sole-earner households....