Work-Life Balance and Labor Force Attachment at Older Ages

We use data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the role of work-life balance as a non-monetary determinant of retirement transitions, conditional on job attributes such as hours of work, compensation, and benefits. We rely on self-reported measures of work-life conflict to proxy for low levels of work-life balance. We show that high levels of work-life conflict are significantly associated with subsequent reductions in labor supply for workers aged 51 to 79, and document heterogeneity by gender and employment status. Moreover, work-life conflict moderates labor supply responses to spousal health shocks. Workers who report higher levels of work-life conflict are significantly more likely to reduce their labor supply in the two years following a spouse's health shock, and this effect is once more heterogeneous. The moderating effect of work-life conflict is stronger for women than men and, among female workers, stronger for those employed part-time at baseline.