Agenda

Titolo completo: Partial retirement and partners' hours of work: Learning from a Norwegian retirement reform

Relatrice: Elena Stancanelli, Paris School of Economics (FR)

Abstract: Flexible partial retirement stands out among policies aimed at extending individual working lives. Because most people of retirement age are partnered and likely plan their retirement together, partial retirement of one partner may impact the hours worked by the other. There is a growing literature on partners’ joint retirement but partner’s hour responses have gone largely ignored to date. We exploit a 2011 pension reform in Norway that incentivized partial retirement for some workers but not for others, focusing on couples in which only one partner directly faced changed incentives. Drawing on employer-employee register data matched with records from social security and population registers and using a difference-in-differences setup, we find that for partnered individuals directly affected by the reform, labor supply increased by 5 to 7 hours per week, on average. Coming to their partners, only indirectly impacted by the reform, the labor supply of women increased by 1 to 2 hours per week but we do not uncover similar indirect effects for men, in line with asymmetries in spousal retirement responses found in prior Norwegian studies.