中文摘要
我们探讨老年夫妇劳动力市场相互关联的重要性与性质,以及这种关联如何塑造对福利改革的反应。为此,我们构建了一个生命周期模型,其特征为具有异质性年龄差距的双职工家庭、不可分离的闲暇偏好以及内生退休。为设定关键偏好参数,我们的校准利用了来自挪威一项养老金改革的配偶退休溢出效应的准实验证据。我们表明,该实验证据对于闲暇的不可分离程度具有高度信息含量,且需要相当程度的互补性才能与数据相匹配。使用校准后的模型,我们发现,尽管年龄差距存在相当大的异质性,夫妇倾向于共同退休这一普遍观察到的现象完全可以由闲暇互补性来解释。此外,与闲暇可分离的模型相比,养老金改革长期劳动供给效应的三分之一归因于互补性。这说明了在评估政策改革时考虑相互依赖决策的重要性。
Abstract
We explore the importance and nature of elderly couples' labor market interlinkages, and how such linkages shape the response to welfare reforms. To this end, we develop a life-cycle model featuring dual-earner households with heterogeneous age gaps, non-separable leisure preferences, and endogenous retirement. To inform key preference parameters, our calibration exploits quasi-experimental evidence of spousal retirement spillovers from a pension reform in Norway. We show that the experimental evidence is highly informative about the degree of non-separability of leisure and that a substantial level of complementarity is required to match the data. Using our calibrated model, we find that the commonly observed tendency of couples to retire together, despite considerable age-gap heterogeneity, can be entirely explained by leisure complementarities. Moreover, comparing to a model with leisure separability reveals that one-third of the long-run labor supply effect of the pension reform is attributed to complementarity. This illustrates the importance of accounting for interdependent decisions when evaluating policy reforms.