Working Papers

"Association between extended childcare leave scheme and later life depressive symptoms: Evidence from the French CONSTANCES cohort" with Constance Beaufils, Emilie Courtin and Emmanuelle Cambois

European countries have implemented a number of work-family friendly policies in the late 1980’s. A French parental leave policy, the Allocation Parentale d'Education (APE) was proposed to allow mothers to take a long period of leave (up to three years after the latest birth) and keep their position at work for when they return. In previous work, the APE has been found to reduce mothers' employment and activity rates. Interrupted careers may affect women’s health, this study leverages the anteriority of APE to measure its possible long-term effect on health. We use the CONSTANCES cohort, an epidemiological cohort of over 200,000 individuals included over 7 years (2012-2019). The survey provides information on current health status, past occupational trajectories (duration of inactivity and unemployment, occupational mobility), childbirth dates and APE benefits. We assess under which circumstances APE is associated with better mental health, by relieving detrimental work-family strain, or contributed to health deterioration, through its negative effect on career progression.

"Late divorce and delayed retirement: Change in labor supply upon grey divorce"

This article assesses the impact of grey divorce on the retirement behaviors of men and women in France. Divorce is an economic shock affecting individuals' income and wealth. Changing one’s labor supply is a coping strategy that divorcees can exploit to contain the impact of divorce. The increasing number of grey divorces, divorces occurring after the age 50, raises the specific issue of adapting of labor supply on the extensive margin for older workers, especially through postponing retirement. Using a new method allowing the implementation of a difference-in-differences strategy with staggered treatment on a French administrative panel data-set (Permanent Demographic Sample), the paper shows that grey divorce pushes women and men to delay their final exit from the labor market. That effect is stronger for women than men, but such an effect for the latter is new to the literature.

"Are family-work friendly policies all good for women’s health? Long parental leave and mental health" with Constance Beaufils, Emilie Courtin and Emmanuelle Cambois

Women's health as they age is largely affected by their family and career trajectories. Parental leave is a policy at the crossroads of these two spheres. The policy evaluation literature tends to show a positive impact of leave (maternity and parental) on women's physical and mental health in the short and long terms. However, few articles have been able to study long leaves, and an inverse relationship is suspected after one year's leave. This article aims to address this knowledge gap by assessing the impact of a long parental leave scheme (1 to 3 years) on women's long-term mental health.To do so, we utilise a quasi-natural experiment, namely the extension of APE (Allocation Parentale d'Education), a paid parental leave scheme, to mothers of two children in France in 1994. The study utilises a regression discontinuity approach, leveraging administrative data in conjunction with an epidemiological cohort (CONSTANCES), to assess the impact of the APE extension on depressive symptoms (CES-D score) over a 30-year period. The analysis further explores potential channels through which the effects may be transmitted, including total fertility and the proportion of individuals' careers spent in inactivity. 

"Economic consequences of late-life divorce, A comparison between France and Sweden", with Carole Bonnet,  Ann-Zofie Duvander, Linda Kridahl, Sofi Ohlsson-Wijk and Anne Solaz

Divorce in later life is increasing in European countries. We are interested in the economic consequences of such divorces. Compared to younger individuals, older individuals have less possibilities to use recovery mechanisms, and therefore the consequences are more likely to be affected by in which welfare state they occur. The consequences are also likely to differ for women and men who have dissimilar life course trajectories and therefore different economic gains from living in a union. We compare the economic consequences of divorce by gender in two welfare states, France and Sweden. We use high quality and large administrative data which we harmonize, to be able to compare the consequences in the two countries. The preliminary results show that some patterns are similar in the two countries, such as the larger decline in adjusted disposable income for women than men. Some patterns are different with larger consequences for older individuals relative to younger in Sweden, that may raise specific issues regarding this group of population. We find a general pattern that the ones with highest living standard are most negatively affected by divorce but still have a higher adjusted disposable income after divorce.

The gendered economic consequences of union dissolution after 50 / Les conséquences économiques genrées des dissolutions d’union après 50 ans

Supervisors: Carole Bonnet and Anne Solaz

Thesis commitee: Muriel Roger, Mathieu Lefebvre, Cécile Bourreau-Dubois, Bertrand Garbinti and Clément Carbonnier