The Department of Economics Applied Microeconomics Seminar Series presents

"Divorcing Upon Retirement: A Regression Discontinuity Study"
with Elena Stancanelli, CNRS, Sorbonne Economics Research Center and Paris School of Economics and IZA

February 18, 2014
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Social Science Plaza A, Room 2112

The many facets of retirement have been studied widely by economists. However, the effect of retirement on marriage stability has been ignored in the literature. Because marriage stability may affect the timing of retirement, Stancanelli instruments retirement in the divorce model by exploiting legal retirement age in France and applying a regression discontinuity approach. The dataset includes over 200,000 French men aged 50 to 70 and over 166,000 French women aged 50 to 70. Stancanelli finds a significant increase in individual divorce rates upon male retirement. In contrast, female retirement has no effect on the individual probability to divorce. Stancanelli provides a number of possible explanations for this asymmetry in the responses of the individual divorce probability to male and female retirement. She also concludes that the probability of remarriage or widowship (placebo test) does not vary with individual retirement.

For further information, please contact Jennifer dos Santos, dayj@uci.edu or 949-824-5788.