SHARE-ENV: A Data Set to Advance Our Knowledge of the Environment-Wellbeing Relationship.

Climate change interacts with other environmental stressors and vulnerability factors. Some places and, owing to socioeconomic conditions, some people, are far more at risk. The data behind current assessments of the environment-wellbeing nexus is coarse and regionally aggregated, when considering multiple regions/groups; or, when granular, comes from ad hoc samples with few variables.

The Powerful Combination of Cross-country Comparisons and Life-History Data.

In this paper we discuss the value of international comparative empirical studies within the broad field of the economics of ageing. We argue the value is particularly great when such comparative research is based on long life-history data on participants, collected using large-scale autobiographical life-history methods. We identify particular aspects of such comparisons that create value relative to other empirical methods and also briefly survey recent key papers to illustrate each aspect.

The role of heterogeneity of patients' preferences in kidney transplantation.

We elicit time and risk preferences for kidney transplantation from the entire population of patients of the largest Italian transplant centre using a discrete choice experiment (DCE). We measure patients' willingness-to-wait (WTW) for receiving a kidney with one-year longer expected graft survival, or a low risk of complication. Using a mixed logit in WTW-space model, we find heterogeneity in patients' preferences.

Demand of long-term care and benefit eligibility across European countries.

In this paper, we study how elderly individuals adjust their informal long-term care utilization to changes in the provision of formal care. Despite this is crucial to design effective policies of formal elderly care, empirical evidence is scant due to the lack of credible identification strategies to account for the endogeneity of formal care. We propose a novel instrument, an index that captures individuals' eligibility status for the long-term care programs implemented in the region of residence.

The Effect on Mental Health of Retiring During the Economic Crisis.

This paper investigates the causal impact of retirement on late-life mental health, a growing concern for public health, because major depressive disorders are the second leading cause of disability. We shed light on the role of economic conditions in shaping the effect of retirement on mental health by exploiting time and regional variation in the severity of the economic crisis across 10 European countries during 2004-2013. We use data from four waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and address the potential endogeneity of the retirement decision to mental health by applying a fixed-effects instrumental variables approach.

The long-run effect of maternity leave benefits on mental health: evidence from European countries.

This paper examines whether maternity leave policies have an effect on women's mental health in older age. We link data for women aged 50 years and above from countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to data on maternity leave legislation from 1960 onwards. We use a difference-in-differences approach that exploits changes over time within countries in the duration and compensation of maternity leave benefits, linked to the year women were giving birth to their first child at age 16 to 25.

The direct impact of maternity benefits on leave taking: Evidence from complete fertility histories.

Maternity leave policies have important effects on several labour market outcomes of women, and are specifically designed to reduce gender differences in the various dimensions of working life and to contrast the negative consequence of fertility decisions. By making use of a unique data set which contains complete work and fertility histories for different European countries, combined with features of maternity leave schemes across countries and over time, we look at the effect of maternity leave benefits on job interruptions after each successive childbirth. The main result of the paper is that maternity leave legislation in Europe effectively increases job protection and female labour market attachment: a more generous paid maternity leave increases the number of weeks employed but not at work, but reduces the number of weeks spent out of the labour market.