This research examines the joint timing of retirement among working couples. The primary analytic focus is on the effect of family relations on joint retirement, over and above wage and pension levels. Long-term family relations consist of family """"""""bargains"""""""" that reflect independence or complementarity of work and family roles, of husband and wife. Independence is indicated by long-term work careers of husband and wife with little evidence of specialization of spouses on work or family roles. Complementarity is indicated by specialization of spouses on one or the other role. The research will examine the embeddedness of the joint retirement transition in family relations. Complementary careers are expected to lead to a linking of retirment timing of husband and wife, while independent careers are expected to affect pension and wage levels of husband and wife, and the analysis will examine both the effect of wage and pension as well as the effect of family relations over and above wage and pension levels. Data for the analysis come from the 1982 Social Security New Beneficiary Study. The data consist of interviews with approximately 18,000 new retirees and include good data on starting and stopping dates of each job held by respondent or spouse since 1951. Several indicators and available that measure work and family commitments over the period since 1951. The analysis will focus on two tasks: a) estimate the effect of family relations and wage and pension levels on the joint timing of retirements of husbands and wives. Major interest is in the estimates of the effect of family relations over and above the effect of wage and pension levels. The major analytic technique for this task is survival analysis, using Cox regression; b) a secondary task is the estimation of the effect of early and late family relations on the late career characteristics of husbands and wives on a wage and pension level. The analytic techniques for this task include multiple and logistic regression.
| Henretta, J C; Chan, C G; O'Rand, A M (1992) Retirement reason versus retirement process: examining the reasons for retirement typology. J Gerontol 47:S1-7 |
