Does the balance of power within a family matter? The case of the Retirement Equity Act

This paper studies within-family decision making regarding investment in income protection for surviving spouses using a simple and tractable Nash-bargaining model. A change in US pension law (the Retirement Equity Act of 1984) is used as an instrument to derive predictions from the bargaining model about the household demand for survivor annuities and life insurance and to contrast these with the predictions of the classical single-utility-function model of the household. In the empirical part of the paper, the predictions of the classical model are rejected in favor of the predictions of the Nash-bargaining model.