growing labor groups in the US. A great deal of research has examined the effects of health status and health shocks on retirement. It is widely found that individuals in poor health generally retire earlier than those in better health. This does not necessarily imply that poor health status leads people to retire earlier, since in surveys retirees may be more likely to exaggerate their poor health status to justify their earlier decision to retire. This justification bias, however, is likely to be small. In general, declining health over time, as well as the onset of new health conditions, have been found to be positively related to earlier retirement. Health conditions that can cause someone to retire include hypertension, diabetes mellitus, sleep apnea, joint diseases, and hyperlipidemia. Most people are married when they reach retirement age; thus, spouse's employment status may affect one's decision to retire. On average, husbands are three years older than their wives in the U.S., and spouses often coordinate their retirement decisions. Thus, men are more likely to retire if their wives are also retired than if they are still in the labor force, and vice versa. EU member states Researchers analyzed factors affecting retirement decisions in EU member states: Alba-Ramirez (1997) uses micro data from the Active Population Survey of Spain and logit model for analyzing determinants of retirement decision and finds that having more members in the household, and as well as children, has a negative effect on the probability of retirement among older males. This is an intuitive result as males in bigger household with children have to earn more and pension benefits will be less than needed for household. Antolin and Scarpetta (1998) using German Socio-Economic Panel and hazard model find that Socio-demographic factors such as health and gender have a strong impact on the retirement decision: women tend to retire earlier than men, and poor health makes people go into retirement, particularly in the case of disability retirement. The relationship between health status and retirement is significant for both self-assessed and objective indicators of health status. This is similar finding to the previous research of Blau and Riphahn (1997); using individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel as well, but controlling for different variables they found that if individual has chronic health condition, then he tends to retire. Antolin and Scarpetta (1998) use better measure for health status than Blau and