Individual cognitive functioning declines over time. We seek to understand how adverse physical health shocks in older ages contribute to this development. By use of event-study methods and data from the USA, England and several countries in Continental Europe we find evidence that health shocks...

Unemployment swings have distributional consequences if some groups are hit harder than others. We examine if the sensitivity to local unemployment rates varies by characteristics such as health, cognitive ability and non-cognitive ability. Data on these variables come from registers covering...

I study the association between cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and mortality, and investigate how well income and education act as proxy measures for ability. The risk of premature mortality is estimated using Cox proportional hazard models with a dataset of 692,303 Swedish men aged 18-20...

We test the robustness of the results of Cutler and Lleras-Muney (2010) on the role of personality in explaining the education-health gradient by using alternative measures of child personality available in the National Child Development Study. We show that, alternatively to the authors...

We aim to disentangle the relative contributions of (i) cognitive ability, and (ii) education on health and mortality using a structural equation model suggested by Conti et al. (2010). We extend their model by allowing for a duration dependent variable, and an ordinal educational variable. Data...