Economics Research Seminar Series: Adeline Delavande

Adeline Delevande, University of Technology Sydney 

Topic

Information-Sharing within Couples: Evidence from a Sequential Survey of Spouses (with Gizem Kosar and Basit Zafar)  

abstract

Collective models of household decision-making typically assume that partners share information perfectly and hold similar expectations. We conduct a survey of 2,200 middle-aged spouses to test the hypothesis of expectations alignment and to quantify the extent of information sharing. Our focus is on expectations about Social Security benefits. We first show that only a minority of couples have similar expectations about a given spouse’s benefit; the correlation in expectations is 0.68, well below 1. We then provide causal evidence on sharing of information within couples by leveraging a randomized information provision combined with a sequential survey design within couples (where the second spouse is surveyed 1-2 weeks after the index spouse). The treatment leads the index spouses to revise their expectations substantially, and reduces the absolute perception gap between Social Security benefits expectations and the forecast provided as treatment by about 22 percentage point (39\% of the baseline gap). We further explore whether this information spills over to the second spouse. Consistent with some information sharing, having a treated spouse leads to a secondary spouse having an absolute gap that is 10-12pp lower. That is, nearly half of the information spillovers to the second spouse. Lack of communication barriers and gains from sharing lead to higher spillover. Overall, our results are consistent with cooperative models of household decision-making with information frictions.