Hendrik Jürges

A new comprehensive and international view on ageing: introducing the 'Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe'

This paper introduces the ‘Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe’ (SHARE) to researchers on ageing. SHARE provides an infrastructure to help researchers better understand the individual and population ageing process: where we are, where we are heading to, and how we can influence the quality of life as we age, both as individuals and as societies. The baseline wave in 2004 provides data on the life circumstances of some 27,000 persons aged 50 and over in 11 European countries, ranging from Scandinavia across Western and Central Europe to the Mediterranean. SHARE has made great efforts to deliver truly comparable data, so we can reliably study how differences in cultures, living conditions and policy approaches shape the life of Europeans just before and after retirement. The paper first describes the SHARE data. In order to demonstrate its value, it then presents highlights from the three main research areas covered by SHARE, namely economics, sociology, and health.

Changes in compulsory schooling and the causal effect of education on health: evidence from Germany.

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health-related behavior in West Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach using as natural experiments several changes in compulsory schooling laws between 1949 and 1969. These law changes generate exogenous variation in years of schooling both across states and over time. We find evidence for a strong and significant causal effect of years of schooling on long-term illness for men but not for women. Moreover, we provide somewhat weaker evidence of a causal effect of education on the likelihood of having weight problems for both sexes. On the other hand, we find little evidence for a causal effect of education on smoking behavior. Overall, our estimates suggest significant non-monetary returns to education with respect to health outcomes but not necessarily with respect to health-related behavior.

The Effect of Central Exit Examinations on Student Achievement: Quasi-experimental Evidence from TIMSS Germany

This paper makes use of the regional variation in schooling legislation within the German secondary education system to estimate the causal effect of central exit examinations on student performance. We propose a difference-in-differences framework that exploits the quasi-experimental nature of the German TIMSS middle-school sample. The estimates show that students in federal states with central exit examinations clearly outperform students in other federal states, but that only part of the difference can be attributed to central exit examinations. Our results suggest that central examinations increase student achievement by about one third school year equivalent.

The Effect of Compulsory Schooling on Health - Evidence from Biomarkers

Using data from the Health Survey for England and the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing, we estimate the causal effect of schooling on health. Identification comes from two nation wide increases in British compulsory school leaving age in 1947 and 1973, respectively. Our study complements earlier studies exploiting compulsory schooling laws as source of exogenous variation in schooling by using biomarkers as measures of health outcomes in addition to self-reported measures. We find a strong positive correlation between education and health, both self-rated and measured by blood fibrinogen and C-reactive protein levels. However, we find ambiguous causal effects of schooling on womens self-rated health and insignificant causal effects of schooling on mens self-rated health and biomarker levels in both sexes.

What Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong: Birthday Effects and Early Tracking in the German School System

At the age of ten German pupils are given a secondary school track recommendation which largely determines the actual track choice. Track choice has major effects on the life course, mainly through labor market outcomes. Using data from the German PISA extension study, we analyze the effect of month of birth and thus relative age on such recommendations. We find that younger pupils are less often recommended to and actually attend Gymnasium, the most attractive track in terms of later life outcomes. Flexible enrolment and grade retention partly offset these inequalities and the relative age effect dissipates as students age.

Teacher quality and incentives - Theoretical and empirical effects of standards on teacher quality

Applying the theory of yardstick competition to the schooling system, we show that it is optimal to have central tests of student achievement and to engage in benchmarking, because it raises the quality of teaching. This is true even if teachers´pay (defined in monetary terms) is not performance-related. If teachers value reputation, and if teaching output is measured so that it becomes comparable, teachers will increase their effort. The theory is tested using the German PISA-E data. Use is made of the fact that central exams exist in some federal states of Germany but not in all. The empirical evidence suggests that central exams have a positive effect on the quality of teaching.

Educational level and changes in health across Europe: longitudinal results from SHARE:

We use cross-national, longitudinal data to explore the impact of educational level on changes in health outcomes among Europeans aged over 50. Our analyses are performed separately for Northern, Western and Southern Europe, as these regions broadly represent different welfare state regimes. We find that low education is associated with higher incident events — over a two-year period — of poor health, chronic diseases and disability, but it is less consistently associated with new events of long-standing illness. Net of behavioural risk factors, educational effects are more consistent in Western and Southern Europe than in the Nordic welfare states. In Northern Europe, lower education is associated with less financial and employment disadvantage than in Southern or Western Europe. After controlling for educational differences in these factors, effects of educational level on health deterioration remain significant for most outcomes in Western and Southern Europe, whereas they are weaker and non-significant after adjustment in Northern Europe.

Parental Income and Child Health in Germany

Using newly available data from Germany, we study the relationship between parental income and child health. We find a strong gradient between parental income and subjective child health as has been documented earlier in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The relationship in Germany is about as strong as in the United States and stronger than in the United Kingdom. However, in contrast to US results, we do not find consistent evidence that the disadvantages associated with low parental income accumulate as the child ages, nor that children from low socioeconomic background are more likely to suffer from doctor-diagnosed conditions. There is some evidence, however, that high-income children are better able to cope with the adverse consequences of chronic conditions. Investigating potential diagnosis bias, we find only weak evidence for health disadvantages for low-income children when using objective health measures, but some evidence for under-utilization of health services among low-income families.

Gender and the Division of Household Labor in Older Couples A European Perspective

Using microdata from the 2004 Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), this study takes a cross-national perspective to investigate the division of household labor among older couples (aged 50 years or more). Across nine continental European countries, the authors find considerable variation in the overall distribution of housework between partners, with more egalitarian countries in northern Europe and more traditional countries in southern Europe. A multilevel analysis shows that about half of the between-country variance in the division of housework is due to differences in older couples’ characteristics, but that there are no country-specific effects of the main microlevel explanatory variables. Finally, the authors find a significant effect of macrolevel gender inequalities on couples’ division of housework, suggesting that older couples living in more gender-egalitarian countries are more likely to exhibit an equal sharing of household labor.

Self-assessed health, reference levels and mortality

The article studies the relationship between self-assessed health (SAH) and subsequent mortality in the German Socio-Economic Panel. Specifically, I examine whether socio-economic characteristics of respondents have an effect on mortality, conditional on SAH. Such conditional effects are shown to exist for various covariates, including age, income and wealth. These findings question the comparability of SAH across different socio-economic groups.