JEL Classifications: J12 J14 R21 R23 a b s t r a c tThe number of elderly persons living alone is increasing and their influence on the housing market is getting larger. This paper investigates the effect of the loss of a spouse on housing and location choices. A partner's death induces a decrease in income which may lead to downsizing. Widowhood may also reveal new preferences, such as the need to be close to care givers and health services. We estimate the effect of a transition to widowhood on housing consumption and location choices using the French Housing Surveys. Widowhood significantly increases residential mobility, especially at older ages and for those who have children. Mobile widows tend to live closer to their relatives but do not move to coreside with a child. Housing and location adjustments are consistent with new widows moving to dwellings that are smaller, more often apartments and in the rental sector, and on average located in larger municipalities where services are more accessible. The housing demand of widows will be significant in the next 20 years, especially the demand for small dwellings.

BACKGROUND After divorce, at least one of the partners usually relocates and, according to past research, it is more often the woman. Women's housing conditions are likely to worsen. Divorces where children are involved are frequent and shared custody arrangements are becoming more common in Europe. OBJECTIVE This paper analyses the extent to which residential mobility after divorce is linked to parental status and child custody arrangements in France, a topic that remains largely unstudied. We assess not only the probability of moving but also the distance of the move and changes in housing conditions. METHODS We apply logistic and linear regressions to different indicators from a recent administrative database, the French Permanent Demographic Sample, 2010-2013, which makes it possible to track divorced people and their households over time. RESULTS One year after divorce, women are more likely to move than men, although the gender gap is narrower for parents. While sole custody is associated with fewer moves than noncustody for both sexes, shared custody arrangements imply many more moves for mothers than for fathers. Parents more often move near their previous joint home than nonparents, especially those with shared custody. Housing conditions do not necessarily deteriorate after separation, but women are often disadvantaged compared with men.

Marital status and union dissolution are strongly associated with health. Separated men and women have a mental health disadvantage compared to partnered individuals. The lower financial and social resources of separated individuals partly explained their poorer health. However, it is unclear whether this association is due to the loss in income and support precisely experienced through the separation. Due to the frequent asymmetry in partners' individual resources within couples, these losses are gender-specific, giving rise to a debate currently in France. As part of this debate, we explored to what extent gender-specific losses contribute to the separation/mental health association. We used the two-wave survey ''Health and Occupational Trajectories,'' looking at 7321 individuals aged 25-74 in couple in 2006. We analyzed their depressive symptoms self-reported at second wave (2010) and their association with separation between the two waves; we took into account the concomitant social and income changes, as well as the socioeconomic and health situation in 2006. Separation between 2006 and 2010 is significantly associated with depressive symptoms in 2010, independently of the situation in 2006; it is associated with a loss of income, mainly in women, and a loss of support,

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The large pensions gender gap reflects the different labour market experiences of men and women over their lifecourse. However, studies predict that the gaps will tend to narrow over the coming decades. Basing their analysis on a dynamic microsimulation of private-sector pensions, Carole BONNET, Sophie BUFFETEAU and Pascal GODEFROY have studied the effects of France 's 1993 and 2003 pension reforms on inequality between men and women, and show that the reforms are tending to slow down the narrowing of this pensions gender gap. For women, the reforms' most negative effects are linked to two factors: the increase in the number of years -from 10 to 25 -used to calculate the reference wage, which penalizes women with discontinuous careers, and the fact that some women are bringing forward their retirement age now that fewer financial penalties are incurred.In most countries, women receive lower retirement pensions than men. For example, their average pension is 37% lower than men's in Spain (Ministerio de trabajo y asuntos sociales, 2002), 40% lower in the UK (Department for Work and Pensions, 2005) and 37% lower in Sweden (Statistics Sweden, 2004). In France, the difference is 42%. The differences would be even larger if only the rights accruing from employment were considered. In fact, a substantial proportion of women's total pension receipts are in the form of survivor's pensions (1) , paid out in the event of a spouse's death. In France, for instance, women's own pensions are 53% lower than those of men (Coëffic, 2002). In systems that link pension rights to employment -however closely or loosely -the gaps relate to observable differences in the labour market: both in participation rates and in wages (Ponthieux and Meurs, 2004). For women, lower pension entitlements and(1) The main technical terms are explained in Appendix 1.

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