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Evidence from several countries reveals a substantial drop in household consumption around the age of retirement that is difficult to explain with life-cycle models. Using food consumption data from more than 550 households from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the years 1979-1986 and 1989-1992, the authors find that married couple households decrease their expenditures on both food consumed at home and away from home by about 8 percent following the retirement of the male household head. This result is robust for several alternative definitions of retirement. No significant decrease in consumption is found for single households, either in a sample of males or a pooled sample of single males and females. These results are consistent with a model of marital bargaining in which wives prefer to save more than their husbands to support an expected longer retirement period, and relative control over household decisions is affected by control over market income.
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,0, University of Mannheim, course: Seminar in Bankbetriebslehre und Behavioral Finance , language: English, abstract: The literature on consumption behavior finds that households consistently reduce consumption at retirement. It documents a consumption dip of between seven and 17% on average. However, according to life cycle theory, households smooth marginal utility of consumption across time periods. The discrepancy between the predictions of theory and empirical findings is known as the retirement-consumption puzzle. A deeper knowledge on retirement saving behavior is of interest for at least three reasons. First, it facilitates the testing of theoretical models like the life cycle hypothesis. Thereby, it helps to understand if and by how far individuals plan their retirement in a rational manner. Second,... [...] The task of this paper is to assess both theory and empirical evidence of the retirement consumption puzzle. It, therefore, discusses the basic characteristics of standard life cycle theory in section 2. Section 3 examines the main determinants of the puzzle and perspectives from which the puzzle has been investigated. Section 4 concludes.
This paper summarizes five facts that have emerged from the recent literature on consumption behavior during retirement. Collectively, the recent literature has shown that there is no puzzle with respect to the spending patterns of most households as they transition into retirement. In particular, the literature has shown that there is substantial heterogeneity in spending changes at retirement across consumption categories. The declines in spending during retirement for the average household are limited to the categories of food and work related expenses. Spending in nearly all other categories of non-durable expenditure remains constant or increases. Moreover, even though food spending declines during retirement, actual food intake remains constant. The literature also shows that there is substantial heterogeneity across households in the change in expenditure associated with retirement. Much of this heterogeneity, however, can be explained by households involuntarily retiring due to deteriorating health. Overall, the literature shows that the standard model of lifecycle consumption augmented with home production and uncertain health shocks does well in explaining the consumption patterns of most households as they transition into retirement.
Using data from China's Urban Household Survey and exploiting China's mandatory retirement policy, we use the regression discontinuity approach to estimate the impact of retirement on household non-durable expenditures. Retirement reduces total non-durable expenditures by about 21 percent. Among the categories of non-durable expenditures, retirement reduces the work-related expenditures and the expenditures on food consumed at home but does not has a significant effect on expenditures on entertainment. After excluding work-related expenditures, expenditures on food consumed at home and expenditures on entertainment, retirement does not have a significant effect on the remained non-durable expenditures. The findings suggest that retirement consumption puzzle might not a puzzle if an extended life-cycle model with home production is considered.
The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires "consumption smoothing." According to previous results based on partial spending and on synthetic panels, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement. The reduction cannot be explained by the simple one-good life-cycle model, so it has been referred to as the retirement-consumption puzzle. An interpretation is that at retirement individuals discover they have fewer economic resources than they had anticipated prior to retirement, and as a consequence reduce consumption. This interpretation challenges the life-cycle model where consumers are assumed to be forward-looking. Using panel data, we find that prior to retirement workers anticipated on average a decline of 13.3% in spending and after retirement they recollected a decline of 12.9%: widespread surprise is not the explanation for the retirement-consumption puzzle. Workers with substantial wealth both anticipated and recollected a decline. Therefore, for many workers the decline is not necessitated by the fall in income that accompanies retirement. Poor health is associated with above-average declines. At retirement time spent in activities that could substitute for market-purchased goods increases. Apparently a number of factors contribute to the decline in spending, which, for most of the population, can be accommodated in conventional models of economic behavior.
Standard tests of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) using data on nondurables typically equate expenditures with consumption. However, as noted by Becker (1965), consumption is the output of a home production' function that uses both expenditure and time as inputs. With this in mind, we revisit the retirement consumption puzzle by documenting that the dramatic decline in expenditures at the time of retirement is matched by an equally dramatic rise in time spent on home production. The innovation of our paper is that we empirically disentangle changes in actual consumption from changes in expenditures. To do so, we use a novel data set which collects detailed food diaries for a large cross-section of U.S. households. We show that despite the decline in food expenditures, neither the quantity nor the quality of food intake deteriorates with retirement status. However, unemployed households experience a decline in consumption commensurate to the impact of job displacement on permanent income. Taken together, the results on retirement and unemployment highlight how direct measures of consumption distinguish between anticipated and unanticipated shocks to income, while using expenditure alone obscures this difference and leads to false rejections of the PIH.
Previous research has repeatedly found a puzzling one-time drop in the mean and median of consumption at retirement, contrary to the predictions of the life-cycle hypothesis. However, very little is known as to whether these effects vary across the consumption distribution. This study expands upon the previous work by examining changes in the consumption distribution between the non-retired and the retired using quantile regression techniques on pseudo-cohorts from the cross-sectional data of the 1990-2007 Consumer Expenditure Survey. The results indicate that there are insignificant changes between these groups at the lower end of the consumption distribution, while there are significant decreases at the higher end of this distribution. In addition, these changes in the distribution are gradually larger in magnitude when moving from the lower end to the higher end, which is found using several different measures of consumption. Work-related expenditures are instead shown to decrease uniformly across the consumption distribution. This evidence reveals that there is a progressive distributional component to the retirement consumption puzzle.