The SHARE International Seminar Series (SISS) presents:

Ageing Unequally: Dependency Risks and Well-Being in Long-Term Care

Abstract

This presentation brings together two complementary papers on ageing, dependency, and well-being in Europe. The first paper, co-authored with Anne Laferrère (Université Paris Dauphine), examines whether older individuals are less satisfied when living in nursing homes compared to private homes by using SHARE data and various empirical strategies (OLS, matching, and panel models). The second (working) paper, co-authored with Mathieu Lefebvre (University of Strasbourg) and Laure Heymans (HEC Liège), shifts the focus upstream by analyzing socioeconomic inequalities in the risk of losing autonomy by using longitudinal data from SHARE and HRS.

Taken together, the two papers offer a unified perspective on ageing and long-term care. While the first shows that well-being differences across living arrangements are primarily driven by health status, the second demonstrates that this health status is itself socially determined. As a result, inequalities in late-life well-being are rooted less in the type of care setting than in unequal trajectories of ageing and dependency.

Paper 1: Anne Laferrère, Jérôme Schoenmaeckers, Do Europeans really feel better at home than in a nursing home?, American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 195, Issue 1, January 2026, Pages 221–228, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwaf041

Paper 2: Laure Heymans, Mathieu Lefebvre, Jérôme Schoenmaeckers, Socioeconomic Inequality and the Risk of Dependency in Old Age: Evidence from Europe and the US, mimeo.

Biography

Jérôme Schoenmaeckers is Associate Professor of Economics at HEC-Liège. Head of the Economics Department, he is also the Country Team Leader of the SHARE survey for the French-speaking part of Belgium.

He is an economist specializing in the analysis of ageing, long-term care (LTC), and well-being in later life. His research focuses on how individuals make care and housing choices under health constraints and institutional settings. A central theme of his work is the role of functional limitations (loss of autonomy) in shaping both care needs and subjective well-being.

He combines rich longitudinal datasets such as SHARE with applied microeconometric methods to address issues of selection and causality. His studies show that observed differences in well-being across care settings, such as nursing homes versus private homes, are largely driven by health status rather than the setting itself.

More broadly, he investigates how socioeconomic factors, including income and wealth, influence ageing trajectories and access to care. His work contributes to understanding the trade-offs between informal and formal care, and the conditions under which institutional care can be welfare-improving.