Mathilde Esposito

Women can expect to live longer than men worldwide. This paper is the first to explore the economic consequences of women’s survival advantage and focuses on its effect on female labor supply. Cross-country evidence documents that gender gaps in life expectancy are systematically associated with higher female participation at old age. Individual-level data from the U.S. show that women indeed anticipate outliving men and allow to examine how these expectations relate to their participation beyond conventional retirement age. The next step will be to identify underlying mechanisms and formalize them in a theoretical model that accounts for the role of gender gaps in life expectancy in shaping female labor supply.