Are the widowed too much insured? Survivor’s pensions and living standards upon widowhood in France
Léa Cimelli
No 279, Working Papers from French Institute for Demographic Studies
Abstract:
To investigate compensation through survivor’s pensions at widowhood in France, this paper uses an administrative dataset to exploit a large sample of survivors whose income is known several years before and after widowhood. An event study first identifies the effects of widowhood on men’s and women’s living standards. Then, I measure how much this effect is offset by the survivor’s pension. To distinguish between total and partial overcompensation, I analyse the heterogenous effects of widowhood according to pre-widowhood share of couple income. The results show that both men’s and women’s living standards tend to increase upon widowhood. For both groups, survivors earning less than 40% of their couple income tend to be fully compensated by a survivor’s pension, while those earning more tend to be overcompensated. Survivor’s pensions largely ensure that women’s living standards do not plummet upon widowhood while also helping to prevent them from falling below the poverty threshold.
Keywords: widowhood; survivor pension; living standards; poverty; bread-winner status; gender inequalities; France; SOUTIEN DE FAMILLE / BREADWINNERS; PENSION DE RETRAITE / RETIREMENT PENSIONS; PERSONNE VEUVE / WIDOWS WIDOWERS; PAUVRETE / POVERTY; FRANCE / FRANCE; NIVEAU DE VIE / STANDARD OF LIVING; VEUVAGE / WIDOWHOOD; DIFFERENCE ENTRE SEXES / SEX DIFFERENTIALS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://archined.ined.fr/download/publication/rU_m ... 8f71701192197015.pdf Deposited file (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idg:wpaper:ru_mfowbu9wft_qngvqy
DOI: 10.48756/ined-dt-279.1123
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from French Institute for Demographic Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Karin Sohler ().