IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/pseptp/halshs-01313781.html

The contribution of improved joint survival conditions to living standards: an equivalent consumption approach

Author

Listed:
  • Grégory Ponthière

    (PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

Individuals care not only about their own survival, but also about the survival of other persons. However, little attention has been paid so far to measuring the contribution of longer coexistence time to living standards. For that purpose, we develop a measure of coexistence time—the joint life expectancy—which quantifies the average duration of existence for a group of persons. Then, using a lifecycle model with risky lifetime, we construct an equivalent consumption measure incorporating gains in single and joint life expectancies. An empirical application to France (1820–2010) shows that, assuming independent individual mortality risks, the rise in joint life expectancies contributed to improve standards of living significantly. We examine the robustness of that result to the introduction of dependent mortality risks using copulas, and we show that equivalent consumption patterns are robust to introducing risk dependence.

Suggested Citation

  • Grégory Ponthière, 2016. "The contribution of improved joint survival conditions to living standards: an equivalent consumption approach," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) halshs-01313781, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-01313781
    DOI: 10.1007/s00355-015-0919-y
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Harun ONDER & Pierre PESTIEAU & Gregory PONTHIERE, 2025. "Equivalent income versus equivalent lifetime: does the metric matter?," JODE - Journal of Demographic Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 91(2), pages 210-239, June.
    2. Gregory Ponthiere, 2025. "Social insurance against a short life: Ante-Mortem versus post-mortem policies," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 65(1), pages 255-290, August.
    3. Tréguier, Julie & Bonnet, Carole & Blanchet, Didier, 2025. "How Long Will You Be a Widow? Determinants, Trends, and Income Gradient in Widowhood Duration," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 62(2), pages 467-488.
    4. Harun Onder & Pierre Pestieau & Grégory Ponthière, 2017. "The domestic welfare loss of Syrian Civil War: An equivalent income approach," Working Papers hal-01581896, HAL.
    5. Marc Fleurbaey & Gregory Ponthiere, 2023. "Measuring well-being and lives worth living," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 75(4), pages 1247-1266, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-01313781. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Caroline Bauer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.