Benoît Rapoport’s research while affiliated with National Institute for Demographic Studies and other places

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 individual wealth. Focusing on individuals above 50 and using data from cross-sectional wealth surveys conducted in France in 2004, 2009, and 2014, we evaluate the contribution of their marital histories to individual wealth across different birth cohorts of men and women. We document the existence of a couple wealth premium, observed for both married and unmarried partners who are wealthier than the divorced, separated, or always single. Accumulated wealth significantly depends on marital history. Women have smaller wealth when they have not been continuously in a relationship. This is also the case for men but only for those belonging to the lowest quantiles. Over birth cohorts, marital break-up is responsible for less accumulated wealth. This is mainly noticeable for cohorts born after WWII. If marital histories had not diversified, the wealth accumulated by women would have been greater at older ages and those of men would have been more evenly distributed.

In this article we estimate the relative contributions to the gender pension gap of career duration and income earned at different points along the pension income distribution, as well as the role played by minimum pensions and other partly or wholly non-contributory policies in reducing this gap. Our research covers all retirees in France in 2012 employed in the public or private sector at least once in their lifetimes. We first highlight that at every point in the distribution, the gender pension gap is wider for private sector retirees than for those in the public sector. This is because public sector careers are less fragmented, and because calculation of the public sector reference wage does not penalize career interruptions so heavily. This relative advantage of women in the public sector is probably an additional factor explaining their over-representation in this sector. Applying the decomposition method proposed by Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (2007, 2009), we show that composition differences in the gender pension gap are essentially due to differences in contribution periods and wages, with a smaller effect of career duration in the public sector than in the private. In the first deciles, the gap can be attributed largely to differences in career duration. This effect gradually weakens, and differences in the reference wage become the main explanation. We also show that minimum contributory pensions play an extremely important role in limiting the gender pension gap in the first deciles, essentially in the private sector. Last, we show that in all cases the unexplained share of the pension gap is substantial only at the bottom of the distribution and, to a lesser extent, in the top decile. The unexplained share is generally smaller than the explained one, and favours men.

The effect of motherhood on women’s labour supply has been the focus of a large body of economic literature over the last decades. Since the mid-1990s, increasing attention has been paid to the “family pay gap” or the “motherhood wage gap”, i.e., the differential in wages between women with and without children. As for the long-term effects of children on pension entitlements, the empirical evidence is limited. Nevertheless, different countries have introduced pension caregiver credits into their pension systems in order to compensate parents—especially mothers—for the impact that children can have on their careers and, ultimately, on their retirement benefits. Whether or not these caregiver credits achieve this objective is still an unresolved issue. We deal with this question in the French case, as the French pension system includes the widest range of caregiver credits compared to other countries. We first compute the family pension gap at given ages for women born between 1950 and 1966, initially while ignoring caregiver credits. This gap increases with the number of children. We then show that caregiver credits do fulfil their role of compensating women for the impact of children on their pension entitlements. Taking these benefits into account offsets almost completely the difference in pension entitlements among women, whatever the number of children. For men, children have almost no impact on their pension entitlements, and caregiver credits play a minor role with the one exception that they favour the fathers of at least three children.

While the average gender gap in pensions is quite well documented, gender differences in the distribution of pensions have rarely been explored. We show in this paper that pension dispersion is very similar for men and women within the French pension system of a given sector (public or private). Gender differences are less marked among retired civil servants than among former private sector employees. However, the determinants of these inequalities are not the same for men and women. Using a regression-based decomposition of the Gini coefficient, we find that pension dispersion is mainly due to dispersion of the reference wage for all retirees. But for women, pension dispersion is also due to dispersion in contribution periods. We also decompose the Gini coefficient by source of pension to measure the impact of institutional rules (minimum pensions, survivor’s pension) on the extent of pension inequality. Unexpectedly, we find that the impact of minimum pensions is limited, although slightly larger for civil servants than for private-sector employees. Survivor's pension schemes, on the other hand, contribute positively to pension dispersion among retired women.

Gender-based Pension Inequality in the Public and Private Sectors: A Distribution Analysis Women’s pensions by direct entitlement represent on average a little over half of those of men in the private sector and four-fifths in the public sector. The article draws on the all-regime pensioner sample for 2008 to demonstrate that the gap can be explained in terms of differences in reference wages and length of contribution, with variable weighting along the distribution. The shorter career spans of women have the most significant impact on the lowest incomes, while their lower wages account for the differential among the upper two-thirds of the wage scale. Minimum pensions reduce the pension gap for the lowest fifth of female earners. The article then turns to gender-based pension inequalities. The dispersion in pensions is greater in the private sector than in the public sector and is comparable in scale for both men and women. The dispersion of pensions for women can be explained both by the wide range of reference wages and lengths of career counting towards a pension, while wages are the main factor for men.