Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 29 January 2025, LG 0.423
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 29 January 2025, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Martina Zweimüller (University of Linz) will be talking about “The health care effects of spousal retirement: Evidence from Austrian Pension Reforms”.
More information can be found here:
We study the causal effect of spousal retirement on individuals’ use of health care services, focusing in particular on the role of the availability of a caregiver at home as an important channel. Administrative health register data from Upper Austria provide us with detailed individual information on inpatient and outpatient health care utilization (i.e., number of services, expenditures, and hospitalizations). We exploit the exogenous variation in early retirement induced by two Austrian pension reforms that gradually raised the eligibility age for early retirement for different birth cohorts. This gradual increase allows us to implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and estimate the short-term impact of spousal retirement on individual health care utilization. We find that wives’ retirement increases their husbands’ participation in general health and prostate cancer screening. The availability of wives as potential caregivers also reduces the length of hospital stays by 1.8 days on average, or 54 percent of a standard deviation. This effect is particularly driven by cardiovascular diseases that require more care, such as strokes. We also find a 2.3 percentage point reduction in the likelihood of hospitalization for mental and behavioral disorders. Thus, wives’ retirement improves husbands’ preventive health behavior and enables earlier hospital discharge. We find no evidence that husbands’ retirement affects wives’ participation in health screening. The estimated effects of husbands’ retirement on wives’ hospitalizations and length of hospital stays show a similar pattern, but are not statistically significant.