Labor Force Participation and Retirement

This dissertation contains two different papers on retirement. The two studies share two objectives. The first one is to understand retirement better, and to think about how retirement decisions are related to other decisions that people make during their lives, including decisions about labor supply, savings, and consumption. The second objective is to think about why Americans are retiring later (the labor force participation of older U.S. residents has been going up in the past 25 years, reverting a previous trend towards earlier retirement). The first chapter studies how marriage can affect retirement decisions. In particular, it shows that, when there is some complementarity in couples’ preferences regarding leisure, the increasing labor force participation of older women can help to explain the recent increase in retirement ages of married men. The second chapter studies how different private pension plans can have different effects on retirement. More specifically, it investigates whether the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans can help to explain recent retirement trends in the United States.