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SOEPpapers 670 / 2014
While the health benefits of breastfeeding for both mothers and children are well known, breastfeeding may make it difficult for mothers to return early to the labor market. Maternity and parental leave regulations have been designed to reduce this conflict. In 2007, Germany put into effect a new parental leave benefit (Elterngeld). The related reform increased the number of parents eligible for benefits ...
2014| Anita Kottwitz, Anja Oppermann, C. Katharina Spieß
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SOEPpapers 669 / 2014
This paper estimates the causal effect of retirement on health, health behavior, and healthcare utilization. Using Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit financial incentives in the German pension system for identification, I investigate a wide range of health behaviors (e.g. alcohol and tobacco consumption, physical activity, diet and sleep) as potential mechanisms. The results show a long-run ...
2014| Peter Eibich
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SOEPpapers 662 / 2014
Theoretical research on inequity and social justice as well as experimental research indicate that perceived injustice may cause stress and thus may have negative effects on health. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) of the years 2005 to 2011, this study investigates if perceptions of earnings (un)fairness impact employees’ health. The analyses show that a change in ...
2014| Reinhard Schunck, Carsten Sauer, Peter Valet
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SOEPpapers 646 / 2014
This study comprehensively assesses the immediate effects of extreme weather conditions and high concentrations of ambient air pollution on population health. For Germany and the years 1999 to 2008, we link the universe of all 170 million hospital admissions, along with all 8 million deaths, with weather and pollution data reported at the day-county level. Extreme heat significantly increases hospitalizations ...
2014| Nicolas R. Ziebarth, Maike Schmitt, Martin Karlsson
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SOEPpapers 648 / 2014
A Dynamic Hurdle Model for Zero-Inflated Count Data: With an Application to Health Care UtilizationExcess zeros are encountered in many empirical count data applications. We provide a new explanation of extra zeros, related to the underlying stochastic process that generates events. The process has two rates, a lower rate until the first event, and a higher one thereafter. We derive the corresponding ...
2014| Gregori Baetschmann, Rainer Winkelmann
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DIW Wochenbericht 18 / 2014
Bisherige Untersuchungen zur Bedeutung des Besuchs einer Kindertageseinrichtung (Kita) für die kindliche Entwicklung analysieren vorrangig den Einfluss quantitativer Aspekte (beispielsweise des Platzangebots). Wichtig sind aber auch qualitative Aspekte, die aktuell im Zug des Kita-Ausbaus vermehrt diskutiert werden. Die Diskussion beschränkt sich jedoch häufig auf eine Förderung der Fähigkeiten von ...
2014| Frauke H. Peter
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SOEPpapers 653 / 2014
This paper studies the effects of immigration on health. We merge information on individual characteristics from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2010) with detailed local labour market characteristics and exploit the longitudinal component of the data to analyse how immigration affects the health of both immigrants and natives over time. Upon their arrival, immigrants are found to be healthier ...
2014| Osea Giuntella, Fabrizio Mazzonna
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SOEPpapers 716 / 2014
In this paper we present sibling and neighbor correlations in school grades and cognitive skills as well as indicators of physical and mental health for a sample of German adolescents. In a first step, we estimate sibling correlations and find substantial influence of shared family and community background on all outcomes. To further disentangle the influence of family background and neighborhood, ...
2014| Elisabeth Bügelmayer, Daniel D. Schnitzlein
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SOEPpapers 715 / 2014
This paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. We use an integrated approach exploiting complementarities between controlled lab and representative field data. In a simple principal-agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. Throughout the experiment we record ...
2014| Armin Falk, Fabian Kosse, Ingo Menrath, Pablo Emilio Verde, Johannes Siegrist
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SOEPpapers 710 / 2014
We estimate average causal effects of early-life hunger on late-life health by applying instrumental variable estimation, using data with self-reported periods of hunger earlier in life, with famines as instruments. The data contain samples from European countries and include birth cohorts exposed to various famines in the 20th century. We use two-sample IV estimation to deal with imperfect recollection ...
2014| Gerard J. van den Berg, Pia R. Pinger, Johannes Schoch