Couples' Transition to Retirement: The Current State of Research and Future Pathways

Abstract

Population ageing and increasing employment rates among women have been well known trends for many years in many countries. This latter development means that the share of couples nearing retirement where both partners are working has been increasing. Surprisingly, little attention has been devoted to studying retirement in a couple context in greater detail. This article addresses the question whether and how couples coordinate their transitions from working life into retirement and which factors to consider when examining (non-)joint retirement patterns. The aim of this article is to improve the understanding of the complex interactions taking place in couple retirement processes that touch on the work and family sphere and to promote areas of future research along these lines. It contributes to the scholarly debate by providing a comprehensive summary of research devoted to studying couple retirement patterns and its antecedents from a life course perspective. To this end, research literature from more than 25 years is taken into account and various conceptual, theoretical and empirical aspects of couple retirement processes are discussed. Readers are provided with an overview of the concept of joint retirement, an idea of how widespread joint retirement is, and which factors to consider when studying retirement timing from a couple perspective.