University / Organisation : Université de Namur

Paper or project ? project

Title : Intergenerational transmission of life expectancy

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Abstract : We know very little about intergenerational transmission of well-being for women. Traditional measures are hardly applicable to women due to imperfect data (income) or little heterogeneity in the past (education). To address this gap, we focus on another dimension of economic well-being : health. We seek to evaluate the degree of intergenerational transmission of health, measured by life expectancy for men and women separately, and to explore the mechanisms of transmission. We raise the following questions : what is the role of the ancestor gender? Do we observe a difference in the level of transmission between boys and girls? How do intergenerational effects materialize? We study these questions in the context of two countries : the Netherlands and Sweden. Both databases allow us to track families over time and to link individuals with their ancestors, including women. We find that the degree of longevity transmission is similar between genders, whether we measure longevity as pure death age or as the probability to reach a given age or to belong to the top ten percentiles of survivors in the cohort. Proceeding to separate regressions, we obtain that mother coefficient is higher for girls than for boys, and father one is higher for boys than for girls, but with no significant difference between these coefficients. Before the child reaches 5, we find that the role of mothers is higher than the one of fathers, however only the father extreme longevity benefits to the child.