This paper considers whether women and less well-educated individuals are more vulnerable to the impacts of stressful life events on mental health. It finds they are not. Taking a new approach to researching life stress using data from a UK household survey, the research sets out to replicate and then go beyond previous work which … Read more
Stressful Life Events, Differential Vulnerability, and Depressive Symptoms: Critique and New Evidence
The Economics and Econometrics of Gene-Environment Interplay
Economists and social scientists have debated the relative importance of nature (one’s genes) and nurture (one’s environment) for decades, if not centuries. This debate can now be informed by the ready availability of genetic data in a growing number of social science datasets. This paper explores the potential uses of genetic data in economics, with … Read more
Aggressive behavior, emotional, and attention problems across childhood and academic attainment at the end of primary school
This research assesses whether aggressive behavior and emotional problems from early childhood onwards are related to academic attainment at the end of primary education, and whether these links are independent of attention problems. The researchers make use of data on 2546 children participating in a longitudinal birth cohort in Rotterdam to look at aggressive behavior, … Read more
Gendered retirement pathways across lifecourse regimes
This study analyses data on 1600 women and 1100 men over a 12-year period in 11 countries to assess the influence of institutional and individual factors on retirement decisions in different settings. It finds the retirement pathways of both men and women vary within and between welfare regimes and that they are not uniformly ‘gendered.’ … Read more
Testing the association between the early parent–child relationship and teacher reported socio-emotional difficulties at 11 years: a quantile mediation analysis
This paper investigates the strength of association behind well documented links between early parenting factors and later adolescent mental health problems. It goes on to consider the role of language skills at school entry in mediating those links. The research makes use of from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to look into the first … Read more
Reallocation effects of the minimum wage
We investigate the wage, employment, and reallocation effects of the introduction of a nationwide minimum wage in Germany that affected 15% of all employees. Based on identification designs that exploit variation in exposure across individuals and local areas, we find that the minimum wage raised wages but did not lower employment. It also led to … Read more
Between communism and capitalism: long-term inequality in Poland, 1892–2015
This paper looks at the evolution of inequality in Poland from the late 19th Century to the early 21st Century, by constructing the long-term distribution of income in Poland from combining tax, household survey and national accounts data. It documents a U-shaped evolution of inequalities from the end of the 19th century until today: (i) … Read more
Faith no more? The divergence of political trust between urban and rural Europe
This paper looks the divergence in political trust levels between rural and urban areas since 2008. It concludes that this increasing rural-urban divide has important implications for European democracies. The research uses data gathered between 2008 and 2018 bythe European Social Survey, accounting for a total population of 433 million and allowing a final sample of just over 125,000 people aged over 16 years … Read more
Refugee migration and electoral outcomes
To estimate the causal effect of refugee migration on voting outcomes in parliamentary and municipal elections in Denmark, our study is the first that addresses the key problem of immigrant sorting by exploiting a policy that assigned refugee immigrants to municipalities on a quasi-random basis. We find that in all but the most urban municipalities, … Read more
Geographical mobility and children’s non-completion of upper secondary education in Finland and Germany: Do parental resources matter?
It is often assumed that families migrate to improve their economic and social prospects, and that these additional resources can benefit the whole family. However, existing research suggests that many children who have experienced (internal) migration underperform compared to their non-migrating peers in terms of different socioeconomic outcomes. In this article, we study the effects … Read more