CAREGIVING RESPONSIBILITIES AND THE RETIREMENT DECISION

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The proposed research will investigate the relationship between caregiving responsibilities and the retirement decision. The focus will be on three types of caregiving responsibilities facing individuals nearing retirement age: elderly parents, infirmed spouses, and grandchildren. Existing literature documents the financial incentives affecting the retirement decision (e.g., pensions, Social Security); one goal of the proposed research is to consider non-pecuniary incentives and their effect on behaviors. While existing caregiving literature has documented the effects of caregiving on labor force participation decisions, the focus of this literature has been on working mothers of all ages with preschool age children and on spousal caregiving, with little specific attention to retirement age individuals. Thus another goal of the proposed research is to focus specifically on individuals who are potentially facing a joint behavioral decision of caregiving and retirement. The interrelation of these decisions will require a model of endogenous decisionmaking. The research will proceed as follows: 1) examine the links between the caregiving and retirement decisions and investigate the endogeneity between the two decisions, 2) modify a dynamic "base case" behavioral model of retirement to incorporate the caregiving decision, 3) simulate the effects on labor force participation of changes in public and corporate policy related to caregiving. The principal datasets to be used in the analysis are the HRS and AHEAD surveys. The HRS is a natural choice for the analysis because of its large sample of individuals in the age range of interest (likely to be facing caregiving and retirement decisions). It also contains a rich collection of financial information at the individual level, so that the model will focus on the effects of non-pecuniary incentives while still controlling for the financial effects which have been shown in previous studies to be quite important.