Search

In this paper, the item nonresponse problem associated with wage data collected by telephone surveys is analysed. Using data from the 1998 Swiss Labour Force Survey (SLFS) and data on interviewers, it is shown that the response decision can only partially be explained by the chracteristics of the interview situation, the respondent, and the interviewer. This suggests that the response inclination is, to a large extent, randomly distributed amongst the underlying population. It is therefore argued that wage functions estimated using only the observed wage data are not biased by the large (wage) item nonresponse encountered in telephone interviews.

The data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey (SAKE) have been widely used to estimate wage functions, which in turn have been applied for the determination of wage discrimination between genders. One serious problem with the SAKE data is that about 17 per cent of employed individuals did not report wages. Those studies which use the SAKE data to estimate wage functions simply ignore these non‐respondents. Such an approach could lead to a serious selectivity bias if the response decision is not purely random. In this study this issue is analysed in a double‐selectivity framework, in which both this response decision and the usual market‐participation decision are modelled. Although the response decision can be partially explained by certain socio‐economic variables, a large degree of randomness/unexplained variation exists. The authors therefore conclude that, in the absence of a better model, the standard approach at estimating wage functions (i.e. only correcting for the selectivity bias arising from women’s participation decision) is the most appropriate one.

The substantial increase in female employment rates in Europe over the past two decades has often been linked in political and public rhetoric to negative effects on child development, including obesity. We analyse this association between maternal employment and childhood obesity using rich objective reports of various anthropometric and other measures of fatness from the IDEFICS study of children aged 2-9 in 16 regions of eight European countries. Based on such data as accelerometer measures and information from nutritional diaries, we also investigate the effects of maternal employment on obesity's main drivers: calorie intake and physical activity. Our analysis provides little evidence for any association between maternal employment and childhood obesity, diet or physical activity.

The issue of whether employees who work more hours than they want to suffer adverse health consequences is important not only at the individual level but also for governmental formation of work time policy. Our study investigates this question by analyzing the impact of the discrepancy between actual and desired work hours on self-perceived health outcomes in Germany and the United Kingdom. Based on nationally representative longitudinal data, our results show that work-hour mismatches (i.e., differences between actual and desired hours) have negative effects on workers’ health. In particular, we show that “overemployment” – working more hours than desired – has negative effects on different measures of self-perceived health.

Background: We investigated the influence of self-reported corrected eyesight on several variables describing the perception by employees and self-employed persons of their employment. Methods: Our study was based on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). SHARE is a multidisciplinary, cross-national database of microdata on health, socioeconomic status, social and family networks, collected on 31,115 individuals in 11 European countries and in Israel. With the help of ordered logistic regressions and binary logistic regressions, we analyzed the influence of perceived visual impairment – corrected by 19 covariates capturing socioeconomic and health- related factors – on 10 variables describing the respondents’ employment situation. Results: Based on data covering 10,340 working individuals, the results of the logistic and ordered regressions indicate that respondents with lower levels of self-reported general eyesight were significantly less satisfied with their jobs, felt they had less freedom to decide, less opportunity to develop new skills, less support in difficult situations, less recognition for their work, and an inadequate salary. Respondents with a lower eyesight level more frequently reported that they feared their health might limit their ability to work before regular retirement age and more often indicated that they were seeking early retirement. Conclusions: Analysis of this dataset from 12 countries demonstrates the strong impact of self-reported visual impairment on individual employment, and therefore on job satisfaction, productivity, and well-being.

Using pseudo-panel microdata we show that pension generosity affects early retirement decisions. The changes in the average replacement rate and decreases in wealth accrual between 1967 and 2004 have caused an increase in early retirement probabilities from 16% to 63%.

This analysis uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to assess the effect of ageing and health on the life satisfaction of the oldest old (defined as 75 and older). We observe a U-shaped relationship between age and levels of life satisfaction for individuals aged between 16 and approximately 65. Thereafter, life satisfaction declines rapidly and the lowest absolute levels of life satisfaction are recorded for the oldest old. This decline is primarily attributable to low levels of perceived health. Once cohort effects are also controlled for, life satisfaction remains relatively constant across the lifespan.

Background: Because of the growing life expectancy in developed countries and the exponential increase in vision loss with increasing age, a growing number of elderly persons will eventually suffer from visual impairment and blindness. This paper describes the association between self-reported vision and well-being in individuals aged 50 years and older and their families. Methods: Using binary logistic regressions on data from the 2004 Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we analysed the association between self-reported corrected vision in general, corrected distance vision and corrected reading vision on 11 variables capturing emotional well-being, future hopes and perspectives, and concentration on daily activities. Results: For 22,486 individuals from 10 European countries, aged 64.23 ± 10.52 years, lower vision was associated with a highly significant negative impact on all measured aspects of well-being. Conclusions: These data from a large population base in Europe provide evidence that persons with low vision have a higher probability of concentration problems during reading and entertainment; losing interest and enjoyment in their activities; feeling fatigued, irritable, sad, and tearful; having less hope for the future; and wishing for death. Effective measures of early detection, prevention, rehabilitation, education and research, as well as a holistic view of a patient, could help counter these problems, thereby improving mental and physical health and reducing the economic impact of low vision.

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health of workers using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Methodologically, it addresses two important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectional causality problems and (b) absence of objective measures of physical health that complement self-reported measures of health status. Not only does using the panel structure with individual fixed effects mitigate the bias from omitting unobservable personal psycho-social characteristics, but employing more objective health measures such as health-system contacts and disability addresses such measurement problems relating to self-report assessments of health status. We find a positive link between job satisfaction (and changes over time therein) and subjective health measures (and changes therein); that is, employees with higher or improved job satisfaction levels feel healthier and are more satisfied with their health. This observation also holds true for more objective measures of health. Particularly, improvements in job satisfaction over time appear to prevent workers from (further) health deterioration.

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health of workers using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Methodologically, it addresses two important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectional causality problems and (b) absence of objective measures of physical health that complement self-reported measures of health status. Not only does using the panel structure with individual fixed effects mitigate the bias from omitting unobservable personal psycho-social characteristics, but employing more objective health measures such as health-system contacts and disability addresses such measurement problems relating to self-report assessments of health status. We find a positive link between job satisfaction (and changes over time therein) and subjective health measures (and changes therein); that is, employees with higher or improved job satisfaction levels feel healthier and are more satisfied with their health. This observation also holds true for more objective measures of health. Particularly, improvements in job satisfaction over time appear to prevent workers from (further) health deterioration.

This study examines the relationship between hypertension and life satisfaction using objective measures of hypertension from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Our results confirm the analysis in Blanchflower and Oswald (2007): there is a significant negative correlation between high blood-pressure problems and life satisfaction.

This study examines the relationship between hypertension and life satisfaction using objective measures of hypertension from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Our results confirm the analysis in Blanchflower and Oswald (2007): there is a significant negative correlation between high blood-pressure problems and life satisfaction.

Recent literature makes a distinction between 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' early retirement, where 'involuntary' early retirement results from employment constraints rather than from a preference for leisure relative to work. This paper analyzes 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' early retirement based on international microdata covering 19 industrialized countries. The results show that 'involuntary' early retirement is particularly widespread in Continental Europe. Countries facing economic recessions and having strict employment protection legislation have higher shares of 'involuntary' retirements among early retirees. Generous early retirement provisions of the social security system do not only make 'voluntary' early retirement more attractive for individuals, but also induce firms to push more employees into early retirement.

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health of workers over 50 using the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) and cross-sectional data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Methodologically, it addresses two important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectional causality problems and (b) absence of objective measures of physical health and intellectual ability that complement self-reported measures of health status. Not only does using the SHP panel structure with job satisfaction lagged mitigate the simultaneity bias, employing the objective health measures in the SHARE dataset addresses measurement problems resulting from respondents' affective states. For all datasets, we find a positive link between job satisfaction and self-report health measures; that is, employees with higher job satisfaction levels feel healthier, are less depressed, and report fewer impediments in their daily activities. However, once objective measures of physical health are employed, we observe no such link. Rather, the only positive relationship is for intellectual abilities. These primary findings are then tested using additional controls for working conditions, prior health state and affective mental state. The results indicate that job satisfaction partly serves as a transmission channel.

We investigate the relationship between income tax rate variation and internal migration for the unique case of Switzerland, whose system of determining tax rates primarily at the community level results in enough variation to permit analysis of their influence on migration. Specifically, using Swiss census data, we analyze migratory responses to tax rate variations for various groups defined by age, education, and nationality/residence permit. The results suggest that young Swiss college graduates are most sensitive to tax rate differences, but the estimated effects are not large enough to offset the revenueincreasing effect of a rise in tax rate. The migratory responses of foreigners and other age-education groups are even smaller, and reverse causation seems negligible.

Low fertility rates combined with increases in early retirement pose a serious challenge to the sustainability of social security systems in most industrialized countries. Therefore, it is important for policy makers to understand the determinants of early retirement and especially the role that institutional factors play in the retirement decision. However, analyzing such factors ideally requires international microdata, which have in the past been largely unavailable. To fill this void, this paper investigates early retirement determinants across several European countries using the rich 2005 SHARE (Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe) microdataset, which produces more precise estimates of the effects of institutional and economic factors like pension systems, unemployment, and employment protection legislation. The analysis shows that pension systems offering generous early retirement options encourage early departure from the labor market. In addition, pension wealth accrual rate exerts a greater influence on early retirement decisions than does the average replacement rate, while stricter employment protection legislation has no significant impact.

Low fertility rates combined with increases in early retirement pose a serious challenge to the sustainability of social security systems in most industrialized countries. Therefore, it is important for policy makers to understand the determinants of early retirement and especially the role that institutional factors play in the retirement decision. However, analyzing such factors ideally requires international microdata, which have in the past been largely unavailable. To fill this void, this paper investigates early retirement determinants across several European countries using the rich 2005 SHARE (Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe) microdataset, which produces more precise estimates of the effects of institutional and economic factors like pension systems, unemployment, and employment protection legislation. The analysis shows that pension systems offering generous early retirement options encourage early departure from the labor market. In addition, pension wealth accrual rate exerts a greater influence on early retirement decisions than does the average replacement rate, while stricter employment protection legislation has no significant impact.

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health using the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) and cross-sectional data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Methodologically, it addresses two important design problems frequently encountered in the literature: (a) cross-sectional causality problems and (b) unobserved negative affectivity in self-report measures of health status. In this study, however, using the SHP panel structure with job satisfaction lagged eliminates the simultaneity bias, while employing the objective health measures in the SHARE dataset addresses the negative affectivity issue. For all datasets, a positive link is found between job satisfaction and self-report health measures: employees with higher job satisfaction levels are less depressed and feel less impeded in their daily activities. However, when objective measures of physical health are used, no such positive link is observed. Rather, the only positive relationship occurs between job satisfaction and intellectual abilities.

With the emerging international competition to attract highly skilled migrants, the determinants of their choice of residential location are increasing in importance. Besides expected wages and job opportunities, the costs of migration and the subjective evaluation of a location, two other factors help determine the expected net return from migration: taxes and network effects. Yet empirical research on the effects of these two factors and their interaction on highly skilled migration is lacking. The aim of this paper is to throw some empirical light on the role of these two factors via a case study of Switzerland. For several reasons, Switzerland is a particularly interesting case study for this task. Tax rates are primarily determined at the local level and thus enough variation exists to analyse their influence on migration. Furthermore, in contrast to other European countries, Switzerland has pursued a fairly liberal immigration policy and maintains a unique permit system that has become increasingly skills-focused: more than 35% of all persons with a university degree resident in Switzerland are immigrants. Analysis of the 2000 Swiss census data provides evidence for fiscally-induced migration within Switzerland, particularly with respect to a location choice of highly skilled immigrants.

We look at the relation between democracy and perceived subjective well-being, taking also into account the impact of income and culture. After briefly reviewing the empirical results for Switzerland, we re-estimate this relationship allowing for the relative income position of individuals and also using a new more recent data from the Swiss Household Panel. No robust relationship between the extent of (direct) democracy and happiness can be observed. In a second step, we conduct a cross-national analysis, covering 28 countries with data from the 1998 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). There we observe a robust positive and significant relationship between democracy and happiness.

We look at the relation between democracy and perceived subjective well-being, taking also into account the impact of income and culture. After briefly reviewing the empirical results for Switzerland, we re-estimate this relationship allowing for the relative income position of individuals and also using a new more recent data from the Swiss Household Panel. No robust relationship between the extent of (direct) democracy and happiness can be observed. In a second step, we conduct a crossnational analysis, covering 28 countries with data from the 1998 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). There we observe a robust positive and significant relationship between democracy and happiness.

Early retirement is usually explained as a supply-side phenomenon. However, early retirement can also be a demand-side phenomenon arising from a firm's profit maximization behavior. This paper analyzes voluntary and involuntary early retirement based on international microdata covering 19 industrialized countries. The results indicate that generous early retirement provisions of the social security system do not only make voluntary early retirement more attractive for individuals, but also induce firms to encourage more employees to retire early. In particular, firms seem to use early retirement to reduce staff during economic recessions and as a means to circumvent employment protection legislation.

The increasing importance of highly-skilled migration in times of so-called ?skills shortages? is leading to a growing interest in the determinants and characteristics of highly-skilled migration. However, migration theory with regard to the highly-skilled is not well developed. An important strand of literature that clearly serves for the derivation of empirically testable hypotheses about the determinants of particular types of migrants is self-selection theory. This theory dates back to Roy (1951) and has been adopted by Borjas (1987) for the analysis of the relation between the income distribution and the skills of migrants. He concludes that a relatively more equal income distribution in the host country vis-à-vis the source country leads to a negative self-selection of migrants (i.e. the lowly-skilled will be particularly attracted) and vice versa. Borjas has confirmed this hypothesis with data on immigration to the US. Chiswick (1999) and others, however, have questioned these results. Sample-selection biases may arise in single-country analyses and in all studies based on host-country data, due to the impact of host-country specifics such as migration policy, network migration, and the like. Due to a lack of internationally comparable data, however, international empirical studies with data from the origin countries have not been undertaken to resolve the dispute between Borjas and Chiswick. Furthermore, data on the intentions to emigrate (as opposed to actual migration data) has the distinct advantage of being free from the above-mentioned selection-bias problem. This paper sheds some new light on the self-selection controversy by analysing the relationship between country-specific emigration propensities and each country?s score on the Gini-Index on inequality. The 1995 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) conducted a survey on national identity, which gathers the necessary data in a rich international microdata set. We run probit-regressions with two samples, one including all surveyed persons and one including only the sub-sample of the highly-skilled. By relying on the Gini index as a proxy for wage inequality, the paper follows Borjas? (1987) approach. Borjas, however, proxies skills differentials by income differentials. Chiswick (1999) argues that these two differentials may only be poorly related. The analysis presented here partly avoids this criticism, as we compare the sub-sample of highly-skilled persons with all surveyed individuals and with the medium- and lowly-skilled. A strong positive correlation between skills and income, as predicted by standard economic theory, therefore suffices for the validity of our approach. The main result of this paper is that, ceteris paribus, a more egalitarian income distribution is associated with lower emigration propensities, while income inequality does not have any impact on the emigration propensities of particularly highly-skilled persons. These results seem to contradict Borjas? prediction that the highly-skilled should be particularly attracted by countries which have relatively high returns to skills. Thus, our analysis is more in line with the arguments put forward by Chiswick (1999) and others.

In this paper, data from the 1997 Swiss Labour Force Survey are used to analyse the allocation and value of time assigned to housework and child-care. It is shown that men’s allocation of time to housework and childcare is largely invariant to changes in socio-economic factors. Women’s allocation of time to housework and child-care, on the other hand, is shown to depend on several social, economic, and demographic factors. The value of time assigned to housework and child-care is calculated with two market replacement cost methods and three opportunity cost methods. The results show that the value of time assigned to housework and child-care ranges from 27% to 39% and from 5% to 8% ofGDP(in 1997), respectively. The value of time assigned to housework and child-care is also calculated for different household structures.

In this paper, data from the 1997 Swiss Labour Force Survey are used to analyse the allocation and value of time assigned to housework and child-care. It is shown that men's allocation of time to housework and child-care is largely invariant to changes in socio-economic factors. Women's allocation of time to housework and child-care, on the other hand, is shown to depend on several social, economic, and demographic factors. The value of time assigned to housework and child-care is calculated with two market replacement cost methods and three opportunity cost methods. The results show that the value of time assigned to housework and child-care ranges from 27% to 39% and from 5% to 8% of GDP (in 1997), respectively. The value of time assigned to housework and child-care is also calculated for different household structures.

Despite the importance of the relationship between retirement and health only a limited amount of empirical research has addressed this issue, particularly concerning physical health. This study examines whether retirement has a short-term influence on six health measures.Using data from the Swiss Household Panel from 1999 to 2003, we perform an ordinal regression on changes in health for each of the six health measures.We found that retirement has no shortterm effect on the health of the large majority of individuals. Moreover, for those individuals whose health status did change, retirement had a primarily positive effect. This positive impact of retirement is mainly reflected by less frequent depression and anxiety, and by the lower degree to which health is an impediment in everyday activities.The positive changes in health after retirement may be due to the cessation of work-related stress and to an increase in physical and leisure activities.