Thorsten Kneip

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. The data are available to the scientific community free of charge at www.share-project.org after registration. SHARE is harmonized with the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and has become a role model for several ageing surveys worldwide. SHAREs scientific power is based on its panel design that grasps the dynamic character of the ageing process, its multidisciplinary approach that delivers the full picture of individual and societal ageing, and its cross-nationally ex-ante harmonized design that permits international comparisons of health, economic and social outcomes in Europe and the USA.

Ageing in Europe : supporting policies for an inclusive society

SHARE is an international survey designed to answer the societal challenges that face us due to rapid population ageing. How do we Europeans age? How will we do economically, socially and healthwise? How are these domains interrelated? The authors of this multidisciplinary book have taken a further big step towards answering these questions based on the recent SHARE data in order to support policies for an inclusive society.

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. We find that UDL in total increased the incidence of marital breakdown by about 20 %. This finding, however, neglects potential selection effects into marriage. Accordingly, the estimated effect of unilateral divorce laws becomes much larger when we control for age at marriage, which is used as indicator for match quality. Moreover, we find that UDL particularly affects marital stability in the presence of children.

1 SHARE: a European policy device for inclusive ageing societies

“Ageing in Europe Supporting Policies for an Inclusive Society” is the title of a book providing new scientific findings on inclusion in an ageing Europe that will be presented to the public for the first time in Brussels on the 29th of October 2015. For this volume researchers from all over Europe have analysed data from the “Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)” to provide evidence on the degree of social and economic inclusion among the ageing European populations. The notion of “social inclusion” has an intuitive appeal which makes it a quite popular concept in contemporary policy discussions. This holds in particular as its opposite, social and economic exclusion, is still present even in the rich countries of Europe and has many faces: One is poverty, which has increased in the aftermath of the economic crisis, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe. Another is age discrimination, which, while proscribed by European law, is still embedded in many national regulations and in everyday life. But also large migratory flows (e.g. the ones which we are currently facing) are directly related to the social inclusion debate: They are seen as a potential threat to the social fabric – both in the short and in the long run – due to lack of economic and social integration. Intuitive as the concept of inclusion may be, its measurement is far from being straightforward. In fact it can be considered vague, elusive or even controversial. Hence, if the objective of public policy is to advance people’s quality of life, good data including a broad and comprehensive set of measures of inclusion is needed in the first place. This is exactly what SHARE provides.

Curbside Collection and Participation in Household Waste Recycling: A Causal Analysis

This paper estimates the causal effect of reducing behavioral costs of participation in household waste recycling. We use panel data collected in three city districts in Cologne, Germany (n=1567), in one of which a curbside scheme replaced the traditional bring scheme between observations. Using propensity score matching and triple-differences-estimation we are able to identify the causal effect of curbside collection, its variation between types of recyclables, and its elasticity with regard to the distance to collection containers in the bring scheme condition. We find that a curbside scheme is most effective for plastics, metal cans and packaging but less so for paper. Furthermore, the effect of implementing a curbside scheme is stronger when the initial distance to a collection container has been greater. The results of our causal analysis therefore have important implications for effective and cost-efficient implementation of environmental protection policies.