Many of the important empirical issues in retirement behavior involve circumstances in which the needs and goals of married men and women may differ. Increases in market work among married women and decreases in marital stability during the past forty years have undoubtedly changed the retirement patterns of both men and women, but analysis of these influ- ences will be difficult without a conceptual framework that incorporates the family context of retirement decisions. I show that marital bargaining models have important implications for policy. I explore the implications of bargaining models for some aspects of retirement behav- ior and suggest that some observed facts may be more consistent with a bargaining framework than a unitary one. Finally, I suggest elements of a research agenda for analyzing retirement in a game-theoretic context.
Retirement consists of leaving a career job and thereby losing most or all labor income.
We might expect a marital partner, whether she is a worker, retiree, or home- maker, to have some influence on her spouse's retirement decision, but this interdependence has been almost universally suppressed in theoretical modeling of retirement and receives little attention in empirical studies. In the traditional family the husband is the primary earner and his work hours are assumed to depend on his wage rate and nonIabor income, but not on the work behavior or attributes of his wife. The wife, in turn, treats her husband's earnings as though they were property income. As the lifetime labor force participation of women has increased in the United States, studies of retirement by male household heads have been augmented by studies of female retirement behavior that are also consistent with the tra- ditional family model. The results of recent research on the labor supply of older men and women are not in general consistent with this framework because the work behavior of men does appear to be affected by the employment of their wives.3 Only a few studies have treated the retirement decisions of husbands and wives as mutually dependent.4 1.