Adverse life events, such as union dissolution, can lead to an exacerbation of socio-economic inequalities. Although it is documented that wealth can act as a buffer, quantitative evidence on wealth trajectories following union dissolution is lacking. As former partners may unequally redistribute assets and liabilities, union dissolution may be a key moment in life course wealth accumulation. Using Dutch register data, we estimate the short-term effect of union dissolution on net per capita wealth trajectories using a stacked event study design. After union dissolution, women’s wealth decreases while men’s wealth increases. The mechanisms underlying these trends are opposite: men have an increase in per capita liabilities but an even larger increase in per capita assets, while women’s decrease in assets is larger than their decrease in liabilities. We discuss the existence of recovery channels, namely inter vivos gifts, which act as informal insurance for a specific subpopulation, and repartnering. For women, these recovery channels mitigate the negative and long-lasting effects of union dissolution on their wealth trajectories.
Wealth Inequality from the Cradle. The Effects of Sibship Size on Children’s Assets, with Marion Leturcq
Parents commonly subscribe to financial products in their children’s names during childhood. Using detailed data from the French wealth survey, we investigate the impact of sibship size on underage child’s wealth defined as the value of financial assets owned by children. Focusing on the eldest child, we find a negative correlation between sibship size and child wealth, even after controlling for age. We instrument sibship size by the exogenous variation induced by a twin birth at second rank and find a strong negative impact of sibship size on child’s wealth. Heterogeneity analyses do not show stark gender or rank of birth differences for this effect. As financial assets can provide a financial foundation for children when they come of age, these findings unveil an unknown dimension on how growing in a large family disadvantages young adults.
Gender Wealth Transfer Gaps
Dynastic Wealth Interrupted: Wealth Trajectories after the Death of a Child, with Marie-Renée Andreescu
Working paper (french)
Slides (french)
Ce travail s'intéresse à la communication politique sur Twitter des députés français de la XVe législature (2017-2022). La mobilisation d'une méthodologie de classification supervisée de séquences textuelles appuyée sur un modèle de langage par représentation - CamemBERT - permet de produire des analyses de contenus fines. Le genre de l'élu(e) a un effet fort quant au contenu des textes postés sur les réseaux sociaux numériques. Ce discours genré est exemplaire d'une domination masculine du champ politique. L'analyse du contenu de ces tweets capture un espace politique sémantique parcouru par des rapports de force et où s'expriment des processus de légitimation. A l'aune d'une typologie des trajectoires professionnelles préalable au mandat législatif (Ollion, 2021), je montre que les discours répliquent des socialisations différenciées au champ de la politique parlementaire se traduisant en légitimités hiérarchisées dans l'arène politique.
This work focuses on the reactions to COVID-19 pandemic and sanitary policies on divorce-related queries on Google search engine in the United States. I also nowcast the crude divorce rates for 2020 thanks to Google Trends data. Event studies and triple difference analyses tend to identify a prominent lockdown effect over a pandemic effect. The lockdown renders a decrease in relative search volumes related to divorce queries, except for financial features of divorce which shows an important increase. The averaged crude divorce rate for 2020 that I estimate thanks to Google Trends data remains at a stable level, and is even estimated slightly higher than in 2017 and 2018 when unemployment data are included in the panel data model.