Beyond the direct impact of retirement: coordination by couples in preventive and risky behaviors

This paper investigates changes in health behaviors upon retirement among couples using European SHARE survey data. Contrary to previous analyses studying retirement effect in a purely individual framework, or only measuring spillover effects, the econometric strategy controls for coordination by couples in health behaviors, also dealing with the endogeneity of both spouses' retirements. Using variations in official retirement ages for identification, estimations of simultaneous equations models confirm an always positive and statistically significant correlation between spouses' behaviors. Results show no global impact of retirement on smoking and obesity and limited impact on physical activities. However, retirement strongly reduce binge drinking behaviors. Exploring sources of heterogeneity, additional results show that individuals with low job physical burden have healthier lifestyles while results for other individuals are more mixed. Furthermore, with regard to spillover effects, women are particularly sensitive to men's retirement when they are retired themselves, while the inverse occurs for men. JEL codes: J26, I12, D19, C35