The effect of a wife’s retirement on her husband’s mental health

ABSTRACT

This article examines the effect of wives’ retirement on their husband’s mental health in Australia. By exploiting the exogenous variations in women’s retirement induced by the age pension qualifying ages, we find that spousal retirement status has a positive impact on the mental health of older men. This beneficial impact is found to strengthen with wives’ time spent in retirement. We show that wife’s retirement affects the constituents of her husband’s mental well-being in different ways. We also have identified four channels for the positive linkage between older women’s retirement and the mental health of their spouse.

KEYWORDS:

• Retirement
• mental health
• pension age eligibility
• spillover effect

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I31
• J26

Acknowledgments

We thank David Peel (the editor) and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Atalay acknowledges the funding support by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP150101718. This paper uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either DSS or the Melbourne Institute. Atalay and Zhu assume jointly the first authorship of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In 2013, the maximum fortnightly benefit payment was AU$751.70 for individuals and AU$1333.20 for couples.

² Although one can argue that reaching the own official eligibility age might have an independent impact on own health, especially mental, if it is considered a milestone in an individual’s life. There are no prior reason why wife’s eligibility age should have a direct impact on husband’s health, especially after controlling the age profiles of husband and wife.

³ Local macroeconomic conditions might be correlated with employment hence it is important to control them in the first stage. Furthermore, recent studies show that local unemployment and house prices have direct impacts on one’s health status (see Ruhm 2005; Fichera and Gathergood 2016).

⁴ The results and significance levels are qualitatively unchanged when we include husband’s retirement as a control.

⁵ As displayed in Table 1, there are between birth-cohort variations in pension age eligibility among Australian women, which can be utilised as a suitable instrument for women’s retirement. However, this variation does not exist among men, as the eligibility age has remained constant at 65 for them.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP150101718];