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Wealth accumulation is the result of several factors: saving behaviors, inheritance, work and marital histories. In a context of increasing diversity of marital histories over cohorts, this article examines how relationship history may shape long-term wealth accumulation and wealth inequality. It goes beyond household wealth by looking at individua...
Citations
... Beyond income, it is also relevant to consider how family transitions such as entering a cohabitation are linked to women's and men's wealth because wealth and income reflect different aspects of economic well-being and are only weakly correlated (Killewald, Pfeffer, and Schachner 2017). While several studies have shown that marriage is linked to substantial wealth premiums for women and men (Lersch 2017;Kapelle and Lersch 2020;Kapelle and Vidal 2022;Lee 2022;Niimi 2022;Bonnet et al. 2023), it remains unclear whether cohabitation is related to similar wealth premiums. Evidence on the existence and the size of the cohabitation wealth premium is crucial in understanding how demographic shifts towards more cohabitation shape social stratification in the wealth dimension. ...
We examine the association between cohabitation and women's and men's wealth, closely considering the distinct regulatory and normative contexts in France and Eastern and Western Germany. Using longitudinal data from the German SocioEconomic Panel Study (2002-2017) and the French wealth survey Histoire de Vie et Patrimoine (2014/15-2020/21), we apply fixed-effects regression models to examine potential wealth advantages associated with cohabitation, including the relevance of gender and contextual differences. We find that cohabitation is positively associated with women's and men's wealth across contexts, without meaningful gender differences. For France, entering a Pacs (i.e. registered cohabitation) is associated with an additional premium beyond the (unregistered) cohabitation premium-though these effects may not be causal. Overall, our results suggest that the regulatory treatment of cohabitation plays a more significant role in shaping the wealth accumulation of cohabiting women and men than normative acceptance, while gender has little impact on the associated benefits.
... In particular, the gaps resulting from women's past work interruptions are not accounted for. In future studies, it will be important to track respondents' income and employment histories, as well as marital histories, as did Bonnet et al. (2022), to estimate with more precision what part of the gender wealth gap is explained by income disparities and what part remains unexplained. ...
Private wealth is becoming increasingly important in planning for retirement and protecting against life risks; however, limited research has addressed the gender wealth gap in Canada. This gap remains largely unexplored because of the collection of wealth data at the household level in existing surveys within the country, which obscures disparities within couples. To overcome this limitation, this article uses new personal wealth data from an original survey conducted in 2022 in the province of Québec (N: 4816). The analyses were performed using quantile regression and decomposition at the 70th, 80th, and 90th quantiles. The results reveal significant wealth inequalities favoring men that appear even more pronounced among partnered adults than those who are unpartnered. The gender wealth gap is partly explained by differences in income and ownership of real estate other than the principal residence between men and women. However, a substantial portion of this gap remains unexplained. These findings highlight the need to collect wealth data at both household and individual levels in Canada to better understand gender-based economic disparities. They also call for more research on the processes underpinning the gender wealth gap by suggesting that it does not simply reflect the wage gap between men and women.
... It is now well established that marriage is an important determinant of wealth: Continuously married men and women are wealthier than never-married people or those with a disrupted marital life (Wilmoth & Koso, 2002;Zagorsky, 2005;Bonnet et al., 2022;Nutz, 2022). In terms of marital and inheritance regimes, the legal frameworks of marriage shape within-household wealth distribution and gendered patterns of wealth ownership (Deere & Doss, 2006). ...
This paper examines wealth accumulation among couple-headed households and investigates changes in within-household inequality over time and across couple statuses. Going beyond previous research that mostly studies wealth accumulation within marriages by comparing married with unmarried individuals, we consider the legal statuses of couples (cohabitation, civil union, and marriage) and property regimes (community and separate property). We apply multivariate regression analysis to high-quality longitudinal data from the French wealth survey (2015-2018) and find no differences in net worth accumulation between couples' legal statuses when property regimes are not accounted for. However, couples with a separate property regime accumulate more wealth than couples with a community property regime, and married couples with a separate property regime drive this association. Our results show that the gender wealth gap is larger for couples with a separate property regime, but it is partially compensated by accumulated wealth. Our results highlight the importance of legal statuses and property regimes in explaining the dynamics of between- and within-household inequality in France, specifically within a context of increasingly diversified marital trajectories.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10680-022-09632-5.
Background:
Amid growing wealth disparity, we have little information on how health among older Americans compares with that among older Europeans across the distribution of wealth.
Methods:
We performed a longitudinal, retrospective cohort study involving adults 50 to 85 years of age who were included in the Health and Retirement Study and the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe between 2010 and 2022. Wealth quartiles were defined according to age group and country, with quartile 1 comprising the poorest participants and quartile 4 the wealthiest. Mortality and Kaplan-Meier curves were estimated for each wealth quartile across the United States and 16 countries in northern and western, southern, and eastern Europe. We used Cox proportional-hazards models that included adjustment for baseline covariates (age group, sex, marital status [ever or never married], educational level [any or no college education], residence [rural or nonrural], current smoking status [smoking or nonsmoking], and absence or presence of a previously diagnosed long-term condition) to quantify the association between wealth quartile and all-cause mortality from 2010 through 2022 (the primary outcome).
Results:
Among 73,838 adults (mean [±SD] age, 65±9.8 years), a total of 13,802 (18.7%) died during a median follow-up of 10 years. Across all participants, greater wealth was associated with lower mortality, with adjusted hazard ratios for death (quartile 2, 3, or 4 vs. quartile 1) of 0.80 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.76 to 0.83), 0.68 (95% CI, 0.65 to 0.71), and 0.60 (95% CI, 0.57 to 0.63), respectively. The gap in survival between the top and bottom wealth quartiles was wider in the United States than in Europe. Survival among the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.
Conclusions:
In cohort studies conducted in the United States and Europe, greater wealth was associated with lower mortality, and the association between wealth and mortality appeared to be more pronounced in the United States than in Europe.
