Public pension programmes and the retirement of married couples in Denmark

In this paper we study the economic determinants of the joint retirement process of married couples. We propose a tractable dynamic discrete choice model for retirement decisions which allows for non-trivial saving behaviour. We estimate the model on a 1% sample of Danish couples of potential retirement age drawn from a population-based administrative register. The introduction and subsequent reforms of a publicly financed early retirement programme provide us with variation in the data to insure identification of the parameters of interest: the elasticities of participation/retirement with respect to income flows. Our estimates imply a significant asymmetry in the sensitivity of retirement behaviour of men and women with respect to variation in their own, or their spouse's, income flows. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.