Age, Retirement, And Expenditure Patterns: An Econometric Study of Older Households (Author Abstract) (Report‪)‬

Introduction There is new interest in how people manage their resources in later life, perhaps partly a result of the impact of population aging on the economy. One can think of three broad aspects of household resource management that are of interest: patterns of saving and the use of wealth, reflecting choices between current consumption, on the one hand, and future consumption or bequests, on the other; leisure and work choices, as indicated by labour force participation rates; and the allocation of current consumption expenditure among different categories of goods and services. The allocation of current consumption expenditure is the subject of this paper. In particular, the paper is concerned with how the expenditure patterns of households in the range 50 and older vary as age increases and how they are affected by the transition from work to retirement. A question of special interest is whether observed differences between pre-retirement and post-retirement expenditure patterns are a consequence of age-related changes in tastes or of reductions in income.