Retirement and Intra-Household Labour Division of Italian Couples: A New Simultaneous Equation Approach

Abstract

The effect of retirement on couple’s labour division has been investigated using cross-sectional and longitudinal data, providing, however, contradictory results. This may be due to the difficulty of specifying the influence of latent factors, such as gender ideology or the bargaining process between partners. The risk of misspecification may be particularly high when referring to Italy, where the life of couples is strongly influenced by familistic norms and gender ideology. We examine the impact of retirement of the man on the market and domestic work of both partners, adopting a Difference-in-Differences estimation procedure and using a correction mechanism to control for misspecifications of latent factors. Our results show that Italian men increase their commitment in domestic activities after retirement. However, the influence of gender ideology and familistic belief significantly hampers this propensity for traditionalist men. Finally, the significativity of estimation results confirms that the correction here introduced leads to robust estimates and allows to use a gender-role score index as a valid predictor.