Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:42:29.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Household consumption and home production at retirement in Thailand: evidence from a regression discontinuity approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2022

Sasiwooth Wongmonta*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Burapha Universty, Chonburi, 20131, Thailand
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

This paper uses Socio-Economic Surveys covering the period from 2013 to 2019 and the 2015 Time Use Survey to investigate the extent to which household consumption changes at retirement in Thailand. A fuzzy regression discontinuity design is applied to evaluate the retirement effect on total household expenditure and expenditures on four major categories: food-at-home, work-related items, non-durable entertainment, and others. The results reveal that retirement decreases household expenditure by 11%. Further investigations show that the dramatic declines in expenditures on work-related and non-durable entertainment contribute significantly to the spending drop at retirement. The magnitudes of the declines are more pronounced for low-income and low-wealth households. The results also indicate that the retirees spend more leisure time on home production activities after retirement. Once accounting for this effect, it finds that the drop in total household expenditure decreases to 6%. These results suggest that the sizable consumption expenditure drop at retirement is due to substituting away from market purchased goods toward home-produced goods.

Type
Research Paper
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agarwal, S., Pan, J. and Qian, W. (2015) The composition effect of consumption around retirement: evidence from Singapore. American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 105(5), 426431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aguiar, M. and Hurst, E. (2005) Consumption versus expenditure. Journal of Political Economy 113(5), 919948.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aguiar, M. and Hurst, E. (2013) Deconstructing life cycle expenditure. Journal of Political Economy 121(3), 437492.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atalay, K., Barrett, G. and Staneva, A. (2020) The effect of retirement on home production: evidence from Australia. Review of Economics of the Household 18(1), 117139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banks, J., Blundell, R. and Tanner, S. (1998) Is there a retirement-savings puzzle? American Economic Review 88(4), 769788.Google Scholar
Barrett, G. and Brzozowski, M. (2012) Food expenditure and involuntary retirement: resolving the retirement-consumption puzzle. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 94(4), 945955.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Battistin, E., Brugiavini, A., Rettore, E. and Weber, G. (2009) The retirement consumption puzzle: evidence from a regression discontinuity approach. American Economic Review 99(5), 22092226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, G (1965) A theory of the allocation of time. The Economic Journal 75(299), 493517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Been, J., Rohwedder, S. and Hurd, M. (2021) Households’ joint consumption spending and home production responses to retirement in the US. Review of Economics of the Household 19, 959985.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bernheim, B., Skinner, J. and Weinberg, S. (2001) What accounts for the variation in retirement wealth among U.S. Households? American Economic Review 91(4), 832857.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cho, I. (2012) The retirement consumption in Korea: evidence from the Korean labor and income panel study. Global Economic Review 41(2), 163187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dong, Y. (2015) Regression discontinuity applications with rounding errors in the running variable. Journal of Applied Econometrics 30(3), 422446.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dong, Y. and Yang, D. (2017) Mandatory retirement and the consumption puzzle: disentangling prices and quantity declines. Economic Inquiry 55(4), 17381758.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hahn, J., Todd, P. and Van der Klaauw, W. (2001) Identification and estimation of treatment effects with a regression-discontinuity design. Econometrica 69(1), 201209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haider, S. and Stephens, M. (2007) Is there a retirement-consumption puzzle? Evidence using subjective retirement expectations. Review of Economics and Statistics 89(2), 247264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamermesh, D. (1984) Consumption during retirement: the missing link in the life cycle. Review of Economics and Statistics 66(1), 17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hori, M. and Murata, K. (2019) Is there a retirement consumption puzzle in Japan? Evidence from a household panel dataset spanning several years. Applied Economics 51(16), 17841798.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurd, M. and Rohwedder, S. (2013) Heterogeneity in spending change at retirement. Journal of the Economics of Ageing 1-2, 6071.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hurst, E. (2008) The retirement of a consumption puzzle. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 13789. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).Google Scholar
ILO (2021) Review of the Pension System in Thailand. Bangkok: International Labour Organization (ILO).Google Scholar
Lee, D. and Lemieux, T (2010) Regression discontinuity designs in economics. Journal of Economic Literature 48(2), 281355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, H., Shi, X. and Wu, B (2016) The retirement consumption puzzle revisited: evidence from the mandatory retirement policy in China. Journal of Comparative Economics 44(3), 623637.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luengo-Prado, M. and Sevilla, A (2013) Time to cook: expenditure at retirement in Spain. The Economic Journal 123(569), 764789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCrary, J (2008) Manipulation of the running variable in the regression discontinuity design: a density test. Journal of Econometrics 142(2), 698714.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Modigliani, F. and Brumberg, H. (1954) Utility analysis and the consumption function: an interpretation of cross-section data. In Kurihara, K. (ed.), Post-Keynesian Economics, pp. 388436. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Moreau, N. and Stancanelli, E. (2015) Household consumption at retirement: a regression discontinuity study on French data. Annals of Economics and Statistics 117/118, 253276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
OECD (2018) Pensions at a Glance Asia/Pacific. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD).Google Scholar
OECD (2021) Household Spending (indicator). Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD).Google Scholar
Smith, S. (2006) The retirement-consumption puzzle and involuntary early retirement: evidence from the British household panel survey. The Economic Journal 116(510), C130C148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stancanelli, E. (2017) Couples’ retirement under individual pension design: a regression discontinuity study for France. Labour Economics 49, 1426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stancanelli, E. and Van Soeast, A. (2012) Retirement and home production: a regression discontinuity approach. American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 102(3), 600605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephens, M. and Unayama, T. (2012) The impact of retirement on household consumption in Japan. Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 26(1), 6283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van der Klaauw, W. (2008) Regression-discontinuity analysis: a survey of recent developments in economics. Labour 22(2), 219245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wakabayashi, M. (2008) The retirement consumption puzzle in Japan. Journal of Population Economics 21, 9831005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wooldridge, J. (2010) Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data: 2nd Edition. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.Google Scholar
World Bank (2016) Live Long and Prosper: Aging in East Asia and Pacific. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.Google Scholar
World Bank (2021) World Development Indicators. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Wongmonta supplementary material

Appendix

Download Wongmonta supplementary material(File)
File 44.4 KB