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Trade Union Membership and Sickness Absence: Evidence from a Sick Pay Reform

In 1996, statutory sick pay was reduced for private sector workers in Germany. Using the empirical observation that trade union members are dismissed less often than non-members, we construct a model to predict how absence behaviour will respond to the sick pay reform. We show that union members may have stronger incentives to be absent and to react to the cut in sick pay. In the empirical investigation, ...

The Intergenerational Transmission of Health in Early Childhood: Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study

Children's physical health problems have clear and lasting impacts on a variety of later life outcomes, as a growing body of research has shown. Furthermore, problems such as obesity, motor impairment, and chronic diseases entail high social costs, particularly when childhood health problems carry over into adulthood. This study examines intergenerational relationships between parent and child health ...

Long-Term Antecedents and Outcomes of Perceived Control

Perceived control plays an important role in shaping development throughout adulthood and old age. Using data from the adult lifespan sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, covering 25 years of measurement), we explored long-term antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of perceived control and examined if associations differ with age. Targeting correlates and antecedents ...

The Mortality Crisis in East Germany

Do the Russians Really Save that Much? Alternative Estimates from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey

We use a new independent survey of 4000 Russian households (the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey or RLMS) to study their saving behavior. The RLMS household saving rate (12%) is less than half the official figure (29%). Despite the massive changes of the transition, the Russian household saving rate of 1994 cannot be shown to be different from that of 1976. The patterns of Russian household saving ...

True Health vs. Response Styles: Exploring Cross-country Differences in Self-reported Health

The aim of this paper is to decompose cross-national differences in self-reported general health into parts explained by differences in "true" health, measured by diagnosed conditions and measurements, and parts explained by cross-cultural differences in response styles. The data used were drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe 2004 (SHARE), using information from 22,000 ...

Understanding the Effect of Retirement on Health Using Regression Discontinuity Design

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 ...

Do Immigrants Bring Good Health?

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 ...

Poverty and Transitions in Health in Later Life

Using a sample of Europeans aged 50+ from 12 countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we analyse the role of poor material conditions as a determinant of changes in health over a four- to five-year period. We find that poverty defined with respect to relative income has no effect on changes in health. However, broader measures of poor material conditions, such as ...

Extreme Weather Events and Child Height: Evidence from Mongolia

We provide new evidence on the impact of one severe weather shock on child height in Mongolia. Our focus is on the extremely harsh winter – locally referred to as dzud – of 2009/10, which caused more than 23 percent of the national livestock to perish. This resulted in a food insecurity situation for many Mongolian households. Our analysis identifies causal effects by exploiting exogenous variation ...