Labour force participation of older men in Australia: the role of spousal participation

Abstract

In this article we estimate the effect of spousal labour force participation on the participation of older men in Australia. We find that the decision of a wife to work or not influences positively, and in a causal fashion, the decision of her husband to work or not. We use counterfactual analysis to estimate the impact of the increasing labour force participation of a wife on her husband’s participation. We find that the increased labour force participation of married women observed between 2002 and 2011 has been responsible for a 4 percentage point increase in the participation rate of their husbands.