The Effect of Residential Location on Retirement Age: Theory and Some Evidence on Male Behaviour in the US

Abstract

Retirement age choice is introduced into a conventional model of residential location to show that the retirement age of workers who do not move after retirement can be influenced by the urban variation of leisure and housing prices. A retirement demand equation that incorporates commuting characteristics is estimated on a sample of US urban male owners interviewed by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. It is found that commuters retire around two years earlier than comparable home-based workers, although the evidence provides no support for this gap to be the result of differences in leisure or housing prices across both groups.

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