This paper introduces the ‘Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe’ (SHARE). The 2004 baseline study collects data on the individual life circumstances of about 27,000 persons aged 50 and over in 11 European countries, ranging from Scandinavia across Western and Central...

Ageing is one of the greatest social and economic challenges of the 21st century in Europe. SHARE, a EU-sponsored project that will build up a Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, will be a fundamental resource for science and public policy to help mastering this unprecedented...

I compare education-, income-, and wealth-related health inequality using data from 11 European countries and the US. The health distributions in the US, England and France are relatively unequal independent of the stratifying variable, while Switzerland or Austria always have relatively equal...

Germany is one of the few OECD countries with a two-tier system of statutory and primary private health insurance. Both types of insurance provide fee-for-service insurance, but chargeable fees for identical services are more than twice as large for privately insured patients than for...

Dieses Paper zeigt, dass die Messung der Handgreifkraft ein auch in sozialwissenschaftlichen Bevölkerungsumfragen einfach zu ermittelndes, nicht-invasives und verlässliches objektives Gesundheitsmaß ist. Die Greifkraftmessung stellt nicht nur eine sinnvolle Ergänzung zu selbst berichteten...

This paper uses data from SHARE 2004 to analyze one possible causal pathway of the health-wealth gradient, namely differences in the marginal propensity to save and spend across different health states. Conditional on age and current wealth, I find weak relationships between health and the...

Germans retire early. On the one hand, early retirement is very costly and amplifies the burden which the German public pension system has to carry due to population aging. On the other hand, however, early retirement is also seen as a much appreciated social achievement which increases the...

In diesem Beitrag wird die Leistungsfähigkeit ökonomischer Modelle privater Transfers bei der Prognose des Erbschaftsverhaltens untersucht und es werden einige alternative Erklärungen in Ansätzen vorgestellt. Das theoretische Verständnis privater intergenerativer Transfers beruht zu großen...

The paper studies the relationship between self-assessed health 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 self-assessed health. Such conditional effects...

Education yields substantial non-monetary benefits, but the size of these gains is still debated. Previous studies report causal effects of education and compulsory schooling on mortality ranging anywhere from zero to large and negative. Using data from 18 compulsory schooling reforms...