Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/90010 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 7709
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
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 housewife from 'dual-earners'. We use a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effect of each partner's retirement on household consumption. We use for the analysis data drawn from the French Consumer Budget Survey 2001 that collected two-week expenditure diaries. We find a significant and sizable drop in food and clothes expenditure upon retirement of the male partner. However, the drop in food expenditure is not robust to specification checks and it becomes statistically insignificant when dropping from the sample couples in which the wife is a housewife.
Subjects: 
consumption
ageing
retirement
regression discontinuity
JEL: 
D12
J22
J14
C1
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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