Abstract
This paper studies the impact of women’s retirement on their daughters’ employment. Using SHARE and self-collected historical data on legal retirement ages in 20 European countries, I find that women’s retirement leads to an increase in their daughters’ employment only in countries with limited family policies and strong family ties. This positive effect can be explained by increases in in-kind transfers to daughters and grandchild care following retirement.
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Notes
I define full retirement age as the earliest age at which individuals can retire and receive full retirement benefits.
Focusing on legal retirement ages rather than including all eligibility criteria is useful because: (i) it is a well-defined and comparable criterion across countries, (ii) it is the most widely used policy variable to cope with the demographic transition and the crisis, and (iii) it is the only retirement eligibility criteria that is not manipulable. For instance, individuals may work more years or choose a specific sector to become entitled to retirement benefits, but it is unlikely that they manage to report a different birth date.
There is an additional wave available for 2009 but it is a special issue and questions are different from those in other waves.
The Online Appendix is available at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0bhu62gij222ytd/Online%20Appendix.pdf?dl=0
In a report for the European Commission, Mills et al. (2014) state that: “When looking at the Mediterranean countries, where welfare state provisions are often lower than in other countries and need to be supplemented with relatively large support from kin networks (Kovacheva et al. 2011), it is surprising that prevalence rates of childcare by grandparents and other kin are not more prominent. Portugal, Greece, and Italy all have prevalence rates over 20 percent for childcare by grandparents for less than 30 h per week, but they still are markedly lower than for instance in the United Kingdom.” (page 30).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Paola Giuliano, Esteban Jaimovich, Ignacio Monzón, Manuela Naldini, Mariacristina Rossi, Aleksey Tetenov and conference participants at the SPP 1764 Conference in Nuremberg, the SEHO conference in Paris and the Applied Lunch at Collegio Carlo Alberto for useful comments and suggestions. Financial support from the Joint Transnational Project "CIRCLE—Care and Income Redistributive Cycles in the Lives of Europeans" is gratefully acknowledged. I am grateful to Filippo Ascolani for excellent research assistance.
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Appendices
Appendix A: details on the characterization of low FB countries
In this section, I provide further details about the familialistic model present in low FB countries. According to Esping-Andersen (1999), the familialistic model is characterized by: (a) the centrality of the family as caregiver and as locus of solidarity and welfare provision; and (b) a male bread-winner bias in social and employment protection. Leibfried (1992), Petmesidou (1996) and Ferrera (1996) refer to the role of the family in developing strategies to protect and augment the welfare of members: (a) pooling income from different sources, (b) mobilizing clientelistic networks to get social benefits and access to public sector jobs, (c) securing and transferring home ownership, and (d) providing income and protection to unemployed members. Jurado and Naldini (1997) list a series of behavioral and attitudinal traits common to familialistic countries: (a) several generations living together in one household, (b) high degree of institutionalization of marriage, (c) low female employment rates, (d) high continuity of female employment patterns, (e) family-oriented attitudes, (f) high valuation of children, and (g) relations between generations seen more in terms of obligations. Reher (1998) focuses on two distinctive patterns present in all familialistic countries: young adults leave their parental home at marriage and there is a high degree of solidarity for the needy and vulnerable members of the family. For Trifiletti (1999), the specificity of familialistic countries lies in the state not guaranteeing a family wage for the male breadwinners and hence the families need more income earners. Finally, Saraceno (2000) and Bratti et al. (2016) both emphasize that the familialistic model relies heavily on informal care, but formal care arrangements for children and the elderly are underdeveloped in these countries. For a complete review of the literature, see Jurado and Naldini (2018).
Appendix B: full retirement ages for women
Country\year | 2004 | 2007 | 2011 | 2013 | 2015 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Austria | 60 | 60 | 60 | 60 | 60 |
Belgium | 63 | 64 | 65 | 65 | 65 |
Croatia | 58 | 58 | 60 | 60.9 | 61.5 |
Czech Republic | 60 | 59 | 60.8 | 61 | 61.4 |
Denmark | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65 |
Estonia | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 61 |
France | 60 | 60 | 60 | 65 | 66.2 |
Germany | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65.1 | 65.2 |
Greece | 60 | 60 | 65 | 67 | 67 |
Hungary | 59 | 62 | 62 | 62.6 | 62.6 |
Ireland | 66 | 65 | 66 | 66 | 66 |
Italy | 60 | 60 | 60 | 62 | 66.7 |
Luxembourg | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65 |
Netherlands | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65.2 |
Poland | 60 | 60 | 60 | 60.2 | 60.3 |
Portugal | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65 | 66 |
Slovenia | 59.8 | 60.8 | 61 | 61 | 58.4 |
Spain | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65 | 65.2 |
Sweden | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 |
Switzerland | 63 | 63 | 64 | 64 | 64 |
Appendix C: countries classification by family benefits and values
Country | Low benefits | Family | Parent to child | Love and respect | Ill parent | Child to parent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Austria | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Germany | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Sweden | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Netherlands | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Spain | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Italy | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
France | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
Denmark | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Greece | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Switzerland | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Belgium | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
Czech Republic | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Poland | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Ireland | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Luxembourg | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Hungary | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Portugal | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Slovenia | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Estonia | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Croatia | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
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Aparicio Fenoll, A. The uneven impact of women's retirement on their daughters' employment. Rev Econ Household 18, 795–821 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-019-09473-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-019-09473-y