Retirement Decisions of Married Couples in the United States

This paper models married couples' retirement timing as an important choice influenced and taken by both partners, as a unit. Thus each partner takes into account their age, health, work status, etc., as well as that of their spouse, and the ultimate retirement timing of each partner maximizes the couple's expected utility from this joint decision. Thus, apart from the novelty of modeling the retirement decision as an economic decision taken by the couple as a unit, this model enables us to take into account both the existing situation, as well as expected future developments - such as health deterioration, varying life expectancy, and other factors.