Spousal Retirement, Mental Health, and Household Resource Allocation: Evidence from Married Couples in China

This paper examines how spousal retirement affects psychological well-being in Chinese households using 2016–2020 China Family Panel Survey data. Exploiting statutory retirement ages as instruments in a two-stage least squares framework, we identify causal effects of retirement transitions. Results show clear gender asymmetries in these spillover effects. For men, a wife’s retirement increases life satisfaction regardless of the husband’s labor-force status, with further gains in depression and marital satisfaction once both partners retire. For women, a husband’s retirement raises depressive symptoms while the wife remains employed, but this effect disappears after her own retirement, when life satisfaction significantly improves. Mechanism analyses suggest these effects operate through gender-differentiated adjustments in household labor allocation and joint consumption patterns. These findings underscore that retirement in China is a collective family-level transition rather than an individual event, highlighting the role of institutional constraints and gender norms in shaping the welfare of aging couples.