This paper sheds light on the causal relationship between education and health outcomes. It combines three surveys (SHARE, HRS and ELSA) that include nationally representative samples of people aged 50 and over from thirteen OECD countries. It uses variation in the timing of educational reforms...

The authors provide comparable evidence on the patterns and trends in obesity across the Atlantic and analyze whether there are economic rationales for public intervention to control obesity. They take into account equity issues as well as efficiency considerations, which are organized around...

The authors investigate the direct and long-run effects of fertility on employment in Europe estimating dynamic models of labor supply under different assumptions regarding the exogeneity of fertility and modeling assumptions related to initial conditions, unobserved heterogeneity and serial...

While the fraction of obese people is not as large in Europe as in the United States, obesity is becoming an important issue in Europe as well. Using comparable data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Health and Retirement Study in the U.S. (HRS), we...

Targeting based on individuals or households needs instead of applying universal programs helps distribute scarce resources to those who need it most, avoiding “leakage” of the poverty budget to non-poor households. In this paper, the authors explore the use of different household and...

This paper analyzes the determinants of global life satisfaction in two countries (The Netherlands and the U.S.), by using both self-reports and responses to a battery of vignette questions. The authors find global life satisfaction of happiness is well-described by four domains: job or daily...

In the Dutch Postcode Lottery a postal code (19 households on average) is randomly selected weekly, and prizes - consisting of cash and a new BMW - are awarded to lottery participants living in that postal code. On average, this generates a temporary, unexpected income shock equal to about eight...

The RAND Continuous 2012 Presidential Election Poll (CPEP) is conducted within the American Life Panel, which is an internet panel recruited through traditional probability sampling to ensure representativeness. The CPEP differs from other polls in that it asks the same respondents repeatedly...

The authors provide both a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relation between register and survey data. By distinguishing between different sources of deviations between survey and register data the authors are able to reproduce several stylized facts in the literature. In doing so, they...

Differences in answers in Internet and traditional surveys can be due to selection, mode, or context effects. The authors exploit unique experimental data to analyze mode and context effects controlling for arbitrary selection. The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) surveys a random sample of the...