Economic Cost of Joint Retirement

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Empirically, we observe that husbands and wives tend to retire around the same time. But because women tend to marry older men, the joint retirement of married couples implies that married women retire at younger ages than their husbands do. This study investigates the opportunity costs of married women's relatively young retirement. Unless married couples compensate in other ways for foregone opportunities to increase retirement annuities, save, and minimize health insurance costs, women's younger retirement will result in lower retirement income and thus may contribute to poverty among elderly widows. The specific aims of the project are: (1) Compare the age-earnings profiles of married men and women between the ages of 55-65, and test whether the slope is greater for women than for men of the same age; (2) Simulate married women's counterfactual retirement age in the absence of joint retirement using a structural model; (3) Calculate the value of foregone earnings, pension accruals, active saving, and employer health insurance subsidies by comparing the observed and counterfactual retirement ages of married women; and (4) Explore the implications for poverty among elderly widows.