Women tend to be less financially literate than men, consistent with a division of labor where husbands manage finances. However, women tend to outlive their husbands. I find that older women acquire financial literacy as they approach widowhood - 80 percent would catch up with their husbands by the expected onset of widowhood. These gains are not attributable to husbands' cognitive decline, as...

BACKGROUND While the "widowhood effect" is well known, there is substantial heterogeneity in the magnitude of effects reported in different studies. We conducted a meta-analysis of widowhood and mortality, focusing on longitudinal studies with follow-up from the time of bereavement. METHODS AND FINDINGS A random-effects meta-analysis was conducted to calculate the overall relative risk (RR) f...

OBJECTIVES Becoming widowed is a known risk factor for mortality. This article examines the magnitude of, explanations for, and variation in the association between widowhood and mortality. Previous research on widowhood mortality has revealed variation by socioeconomic status (SES), in that SES is not protective in widowhood, and by gender, such that men's mortality increases more than women's...

OBJECTIVES Widowhood is associated with increased mortality. However, to what extent this association is independent of other risk factors remains unclear. In the current study, we used propensity score matching to design a study to examine the independent association of widowhood with outcomes in a balanced cohort of older adults in the United States. METHODS We used public-use copies of the...

I investigate the relationship between widowhood and the financial situation among women aged 50 and above in Europe. The results of the paper are based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, and its retrospective third wave (SHARELIFE). Using retrospective data makes it possible to analyze the dynamics of the adverse effects of widowhood. I estimate both the short run and lo...

Widowhood is widely regarded as a women’s issue. In all developed and nearly all developing nations, women are more likely than men to survive the death of their spouse, reflecting men’s higher rates of mortality and the tendency of women to marry men slightly older than themselves. Women also are more likely than men to remain unmarried after their spouse dies, due both to a highly skewed sex ...

Using data from the 1980–2001 Consumer Expenditure Surveys, we investigate how impending widowhood affects households’ expenditure patterns. We find that total annual expenditures are $4,027 higher for about-to-be-widowed households compared to otherwise comparable continuously married couples. Within subcategories, expenditures average $4,108 higher for the miscellaneous subcategory which incl...

While it is well known that the widowed suffer increased mortality risks, the mechanism of this survival disadvantage is still under investigation. In this article, we examine the quality of health care as a possible link between widowhood and mortality using a unique data set of 475,313 elderly couples who were followed up for up to nine years. We address whether the transition to widowhood af...

This study utilises philosophical deliberation to analyse the psycho-social and emotional conflicts that arise out of widowhood practices in the Luo community of Kenya. Towards this end, it explores the attendant effects of Luo widowhood practices on family, power and gender relations, and suggests resolutions to the challenges they generate.

recently bereaved, known as the “widowhood effect,” is key evidence in support of the sociological tenet that social relationships can affect the life chances of individuals (Durkheim [1897] 1997; House, Landis, and Umberson 1988). Dozens of studies across a large number of industrialized countries document that bereaved spouses suffer greater mortality than currently married persons (Hu and Go...