| Health Shocks and Couples' Labor Supply Decisions |
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WP#2003-8 AbstractThis paper explores the effect of negative health shocks, such as heart attacks or new diagnoses of chronic illnesses, on the labor supply of both the affected spouse and his or her partner. In so doing, the paper links two important strands of the retirement literature, the large literature on health and retirement and the small but growing literature modeling retirement in a family context. This paper may also be viewed as an extension of the literature on spousal labor supply as insurance against negative events, which measures whether there is an “added worker effect” when one spouse becomes sick and whether it is crowded out by public insurance programs. This work uses the first five waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a recent, nationally representative survey of the young elderly with extensive information on health, labor force status, and demographics. For executive summary in PDF For full paper in PDF Courtney Coile is the Assistant Professor of Economics at Wellesley College. The author would like to thank Deborah Dwyer, Jonathan Gruber, and seminar participants at MIT, the Retirement Research Consortium Conference, and the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute for helpful comments The research reported herein is an extension of work supported by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College performed pursuant to a grant from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) funded as part of the Retirement Research Consortium. The opinions and conclusions are solely those of the authors and should not be construed as representing the opinions or policies of the Social Security Administration or any agency of the Federal Government, or of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
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