The gender gap in mortality: How much is explained by behavior?

Johannes Schünemann, Holger Strulik and Timo Trimborn

Journal of Health Economics, 2017, vol. 54, issue C, 79-90

Abstract: In developed countries, women are expected to live about 4–5 years longer than men. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to gauge the extent to which gender differences in longevity can be attributed to gender-specific preferences and health behavior. We set up a physiologically founded model of health deficit accumulation and calibrate it using recent insights from gerontology. From fitting life cycle health expenditure and life expectancy, we obtain estimates of the gender-specific preference parameters. We then perform the counterfactual experiment of endowing women with the preferences of men. In our benchmark scenario, this reduces the gender gap in life expectancy from 4.6 to 1.4 years. When we add gender-specific preferences for unhealthy consumption, the model can motivate up to 89 percent of the gender gap. Our theory offers also an economic explanation for why the gender gap declines with rising income.

Keywords: Health; Aging; Longevity; Gender-specific preferences; Unhealthy behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 I12 J17 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629616300832
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The gender gap in mortality: How much is explained by behavior? (2016)
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:eee:jhecon:v:54:y:2017:i:c:p:79-90

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2017.04.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().