The Menopause “Penalty”
Gabriella Conti,
Rita Ginja,
Petra Persson and
Barton Willage
No 11761, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo
Abstract:
The motherhood penalty is well-documented, but what happens at the other end of the reproductive spectrum? Menopause—a transition often marked by debilitating physical and psychological symptoms—also entails substantial costs. Using population-wide Norwegian and Swedish data and quasi-experimental methods, we show that a menopause diagnosis leads to lasting drops in earnings and employment, alongside greater reliance on social transfers. The impact is especially severe for women with lower socioeconomic status. Increasing access to menopause-related health care can help offset these losses. Our findings reveal the hidden economic toll of menopause and the potential gains from better support policies.
Keywords: menopause; health care; disability income; fertility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J01 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11761.pdf (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:ces:ceswps:_11761
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().