Job Market Paper

Gender Gaps in Life Expectancy: A Blessing for Growth? 

Abstract: Women can expect to live longer than men worldwide. In a context of demographic aging, they are poised to play a prominent role in the workforce and, by extension, GDP growth. This paper is the first to explore the economic consequences of women’s survival advantage and focuses on its effect on female labor supply, at the extensive margin. 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 their husband, which in turn increases their participation beyond conventional retirement age. Some determinants are a higher financial planning horizon and lower health-related work limitations, although other factors such as spousal care burden and predicted social security benefits may mitigate this effect. This can have implications for designing optimal retirement policies.


Publications

Workforce Aging, Growth and Productivity, the B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics (Advances), vol. 25, no. 2, 2025, pp. 553-593.

Abstract: In the literature on secular stagnation, demographic aging is widely blamed for lowering the IS curve of aggregate demand and therefore the natural interest rate. However, very little is said about the impact of workforce aging on long-term aggregate supply, or so-called potential GDP. To fill this gap, this study delves into the effects of workforce aging on two key components of the remarkably sluggish potential GDP growth of developed countries: hours worked and labour productivity. First, using a novel macro-accounting decomposition of EU-KLEMS data, we find that old-labour input has the highest contribution to growth, through both increased hours worked and shifts in labour composition in the EU, US and Japan. Second, we use panel stochastic frontier models highlighting that, however, old workers have an adverse effect on labour productivity growth frontier—though increasing technical efficiency, i.e., reducing the distance to this frontier.


Demographic Winter, Economic Structure and Productivity in Japan (joint with G. Dufrénot and E. Moreno-Galbis), in: Emerging Markets and Industrialized Countries in the New Wave of Globalization, Springer, 2025.

[Working paper version here]

Abstract: Low fertility rates, mortality outstripping the birth rate, aging and population contraction characterize a new demographic transition (the so-called “fifth stage”). This chapter seeks to evaluate how this phenomenon has impacted the Japanese economic structure and overall productivity. We extend Autor and Dorn’s (2013) theoretical framework to introduce two key mechanisms that have been at play since the 2000s: (i) a growing complementarity between goods and services consumption, and (ii) the substitution of older workers engaged in routine tasks with technological capital. The model predicts an increasing concentration of low-skilled workers in the service sector, which should aggravate productivity gaps between industry and services. Using stochastic frontier models and EU-KLEMS data, we compute industry-by-industry TFP growth frontiers in order to check if theoretical predictions match with Japanese reality.


Work-in-Progress




Non-refereed work

"Public policies and solidarity in the face of Japanese ageing: specificities, challenges and lessons from demographic surveys", 2022 (in French). Dumas, Sociologie. Collections DEMOMED. Metrics: 900+ downloads, 2 citations.


Posters

PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025 — "Demographic Winter, Economic Structure and Productivity in Japan"