Mandatory Retirement and Its Impacts on Consumption in China

This project proposes to investigate household consumption changes at retirement in China, exploring a large confidential data set that has detailed quantity and price information on refined consumption categories. Regression discontinuity (RD) and recently developed quantile RD design will be used, taking advantage of the special institutional feature of China, the mandatory retirement policy. Unlike existing studies, which focus on developed Western countries, this project will provide evidence from a large developing country. This project will also exploit mandatory retirement as a quasi-experimental setting for nonparametric identification of the effect of retirement on consumption. More importantly, this project will provide direct evidence on consumption price and quantity changes, instead of just expenditure changes