Events at CERGE-EI

Eric Bonsang, Ph.D.

Université Paris Dauphine, France

Venue: Ceska sporitelna Palace, Rytířská 29, Prague 1 (Aging Workforce: Older Workers and Immigrants as New Pillars of Western Economies? conference)

Authors: Eric Bonsang, V. Skirbekk, and U. M. Staudinger

Abstract: Previous studies found that traditional gender-role attitudes are associated with substantial reductions in human capital and labor force participation of women. This lack of opportunity for women to engage in (potentially) cognitively stimulating activities over the life course is likely to translate in poorer cognitive performance of women in later life. We test this hypothesis using representative samples from 27 countries covering more than 60 percent of the world population aged 50 and above. As expected, late-life gender differences in cognitive functioning systematically vary across countries: Older women perform relatively better than men in countries characterized by more equal gender norms. By exploiting cross-country variations in changes in gender norms across cohorts, we confirmed that this association is robust against the inclusion of country and cohort-fixed effects. We show that part of this association is explained by education and labor market participation. Further analyses suggest that this association is unlikely to be driven by reverse causality. Finally, we estimate whether gender difference in cognition for each second-generation immigrant group living in a particular host country (and exposed to the same host country’s laws and institutions) is explained by measures of gender norms in the parents’ country of ancestry.

The seminar is co-financed by the European Union.                                                         

Full Text:  WILL BE AVAILABLE LATER