Changes in Wealth over the Process of Widowhood across European Countries

Abstract

Objectives: Widowhood has been shown to decrease surviving spouses’ economic wellbeing. However, previous research has focused mostly on income-related outcomes, and has been less attentive to the importance of wealth, the processual nature of spousal death, and cross-national variation. In this study, we assessed how total, housing, and non-housing wealth changes over the process of widowhood across eleven European countries. Methods: Individual fixed-effects regressions and longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) were used to estimate how household net total wealth, housing wealth, and non-housing wealth changed three years prior and six or more years after spousal death relative to four or more years prior to widowhood in eleven European countries.Results: In all countries, household net wealth stayed relatively constant across the widowhood process, except for in Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland where wealth declines were observed especially in the years following death. However, we found declines in housing wealth over the widowhood process, including prior to spousal death, across most countries in our sample, particularly in Austria, France, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Declines in housing wealth were generally not reflected by changes in non-housing wealth but coincided with leaving homeownership and downsizing. Discussion: Widowhood is associated with lower wealth, especially housing wealth, even in the years before spousal loss. Future research should focus on adjudicating the mechanisms behind country differences and exploring the implications of lost wealth following widowhood for surviving spouses’ wellbeing and intergenerational transfers.