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

Abstract This paper examines how spousal retirement affects psychological well-being in Chinese households using 2016–2020 China Family Panel Studies data. Exploiting statutory retirement ages as instruments in a two-stage least squares framework, we identify causal effects of spousal retirement and further examine how these associations vary across household retirement configurations. For men, a wife’s retirement is associated with higher life satisfaction, with higher marital satisfaction also observed among couples in which both partners are retired. For women, a husband’s retirement is associated with higher depressive symptoms while she remains employed; this association is no longer evident after her own retirement, when life satisfaction is higher. Mechanism analyses suggest these patterns are linked to gender-differentiated adjustments in household labor allocation and joint consumption. These findings highlight retirement in China as a collective family-level transition shaped by institutional constraints.