The effects of Medicaid expansion on the racial/ethnic composition within nursing home residents.

Background: The Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted in 2010, aimed to improve healthcare coverage for American citizens. This study investigates the impact of Medicaid expansion (ME) under the ACA on the racial and ethnic composition of nursing home admissions in the U.S.

The Long Arm of childhood hypothesis and systematic low-grade inflammation: Evidence from parental education of older European adults.

Childhood SES has been extensively studied as a predictor for health outcomes in adulthood, though the direct mechanisms remain unclear. The Long Arm of Childhood Model hypothesizes that this process is a chain of events, moderated by numerous factors such as family economic status and environment, health behaviors, as well as biological processes. We expand on this model with objective measures of health in older age, namely C-reactive protein (CRP), as chronic low grade inflammation, which has been found to be connected to both childhood SES as well as a number of cardiovascular diseases in adulthood.

Legal vs. Extra-Legal Responses to Public Health Emergencies.

There is a long-established claim that emergency action through the law is impossible, or bound to be ineffective. This article seeks to challenge this position by reference to the response of many European states to the Coronavirus pandemic and by drawing on Lon Fuller's theory of law. It argues that there are a number of reasons why a fragmentation of governance between ordinary, legal action and emergency, extra-legal action is neither necessary nor desirable in this specific context.

Symphony or Cacophony? Orchestrating Federal Mechanics toward Covid-19 Response in the United States and Germany.

Governance is a critical upstream tool in public health emergency preparedness, for it provides structure to emergency response. Pandemics, singular public health emergencies, pose challenges to inherently fragmented federal governance systems. Understanding and utilizing the facilitators of response embedded within the system is critical.

The Institutional Tragedy of Pandemic Triage Regulation in Italy and Germany.

This article adopts a comparative approach exploring the reactions to the scarcity of resources resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy and Germany. Both countries showed a fragmented structure including individual hospitals, medical associations and recommendatory interdisciplinary bodies, such as ethics councils. Against this background, the authors use the different constitutional frameworks in which the healthcare systems are embedded to assess the legitimacy of the intervention by non-legislative bodies.

German State Aid for Covid-19 Medicinal Products: A Risk for Solidarity in the European Union.

To respond to the need for a vaccine against and a treatment for Covid-19, the German Federal Government (German government) used various economic incentives to promote pharmaceutical and biotechnological (biotech) research and development (R&D) as well as manufacturing. More specifically, it decided to subsidise several German companies working in this field. Such domestic measures might, however, present a challenge to European state aid law.

Depression and loneliness of older adults in Europe and Israel after the first wave of covid-19.

Unlabelled: Epidemic control measures that aim to introduce social distancing help to decelerate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, their consequences in terms of mental well-being might be negative, especially for older adults. While existing studies mainly focus on the time during the first lockdown, we look at the weeks afterward in order to measure the medium-term consequences of the first wave of the pandemic.

Cross-sectional associations between objectively measured sleep characteristics and body mass index in European children and adolescents.

Background: Short sleep duration has been found to be associated with a higher risk for overweight and obesity. However, previous studies have mainly relied on subjective measures of sleep duration and other sleep characteristics (eg quality, timing) have often been neglected. Therefore, we aimed to investigate associations between several, mainly objectively measured sleep characteristics and body mass index (BMI).

What They Expect Is What You Get: The Role of Interviewer Expectations in Nonresponse to Income and Asset Questions.

Personal income and assets are sensitive topics to discuss. This phenomenon is reflected in high rates of nonresponse to financial questions in surveys. In face-to-face surveys, item nonresponse is influenced by interviewers.

Early Determinants of Work Disability in an International Perspective.

This study explores the interrelated roles of health and welfare state policies in the decision to take up disability insurance (DI) benefits due to work disability (WD), defined as the (partial) inability to engage in gainful employment as a result of physical or mental illness. We exploit the large international variation of health, self-reported WD, and the uptake of DI benefits in the United States and Europe using a harmonized data set with life history information assembled from SHARE, ELSA, and HRS. We find that the mismatch between WD and DI benefit receipt varies greatly across countries.

Reading Fast, Reading Slow: The Effect of Interviewers' Speed in Reading Introductory Texts on Response Behavior.

Guidelines for interviewers frequently include instructions to read question texts exactly as they are worded. Deviations from these guidelines on standardized interviewing might affect the comparability of survey answers and impair the quality of data. This paper contributes to the literature on interviewer behavior by analyzing how interviewers change their reading behavior during fieldwork and whether this behavioral change influences the response behavior of survey respondents.

Do smoking, nutrition, alcohol use, and physical activity vary between regions in Germany? - results of a cross-sectional study.

Background: Previous studies on lifestyle risk factors mainly focused on age- or gender-specific differences. However, lifestyle risk factors also vary across regions. Aim of the present study was to examine the extent to which prevalence rates of SNAP (smoking, nutrition, alcohol consumption, physical activity) vary between East and West Germany or North and South Germany.

Long-term health consequences of recessions during working years.

Economic crises may have severe consequences for population health. We investigate the long-term effects of macroeconomic crises experienced during prime working age (20-50) on health outcomes later in life using SHARE data (Survey of Health Aging and Retirement in Europe) from eleven European countries. Analyses are based on the first two waves of SHARE data collected in 2004 and 2006 (N = 22,886) and retrospective life history data from SHARELIFE collected in 2008 (N = 13,732).

Differences in Subjective Well-being Between Older Migrants and Natives in Europe.

This study examines disparities in subjective well-being (SWB) among older migrants and natives across several European countries using data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Our results show a significant SWB gap between migrants and non-migrants that diminishes with increasing age. While migrants from Northern and Central Europe have similar SWB levels as natives, Southern European, Eastern European, and Non-European migrants have significantly lower levels of SWB than the native population.

Dyadic fertility decisions in a life course perspective.

This paper focuses on how couples arrive at joint decisions with regard to fertility behaviour. We build upon previous work on decision rules that couples might apply as heuristics in order to arrive at joint action in cases in which partners' fertility preferences differ. Previous research found either stronger effects of women's desires or symmetrical effects of both spouses' desires and net benefits associated with (further) children on proceptive behaviour.

Direct and indirect effects of unilateral divorce law on marital stability.

Previous research examining the impact of unilateral divorce law (UDL) on the prevalence of divorce has provided mixed results. Studies based on cross-sectional cross-country/cross-state survey data have received criticism for disregarding unobserved heterogeneity across countries, as have studies using country-level panel data for failing to account for possible mediating mechanisms at the micro level. We seek to overcome both shortcomings by using individual-level event-history data from 11 European countries (SHARELIFE) and controlling for unobserved heterogeneity over countries and cohorts.

The effect of children on depression in old age.

This article investigates the causal relationship between the number of biological children and mental health of elderly Europeans. Specifically, we ask whether additional children improve or threaten parents' mental health status. The identification of causal effects draws on two natural experiments that exogenously increase the number of children: multiple births and the sex composition of the first two children.

Data Resource Profile: the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).

SHARE is a unique panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks covering most of the European Union and Israel. To date, SHARE has collected three panel waves (2004, 2006, 2010) of current living circumstances and retrospective life histories (2008, SHARELIFE); 6 additional waves are planned until 2024. The more than 150 000 interviews give a broad picture of life after the age of 50 years, measuring physical and mental health, economic and non-economic activities, income and wealth, transfers of time and money within and outside the family as well as life satisfaction and well-being.

SHARELIFE-One century of life histories in Europe.

Welfare state interventions shape our life courses in almost all of their multiply linked domains. In this introduction, we sketch how cross-nationally comparative retrospective data can be fruitfully employed to better understand these links and the long-run effects of the welfare state at the same time. We briefly introduce SHARE, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, and SHARELIFE, which collected 30,000 life histories of SHARE respondents from 14 European countries, providing a unique data infrastructure for interdisciplinary research on the various influences of contextual structures on the lives of Europeans during the last century until today.

Tracing the origins of successful aging: the role of childhood conditions and social inequality in explaining later life health.

This study investigates the role of childhood conditions and social inequality in older Europeans' propensity to age successfully, controlling for later life risk factors. Successful aging was assessed following Rowe and Kahn's conceptualization, using baseline interviews from the first two waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). These data were merged with retrospective information on participants from 13 Continental European countries, collected as part of the SHARELIFE project.