SHARE User Conference

Dear SHARE User,

(Apologies for cross postings)

The first SHARE Users' conference organized in Italy will take place in June 28-29, 2012, at the Economics department of Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy. Attached please find the call for papers. Information about the conference can be found at the Conference website (http://venus.unive.it/share/index.php?id=55). Submissions of abstracts must be made to the email from which you are receiving this message (share@unive.it). Deadline for submissions is April 15, 2012.

The Conference has the objective of promoting the exchange of research ideas and discuss results of ongoing research among international users of SHARE data. Submissions by PhD students and researchers at early stages of their career are particularly encouraged: there are no conference fees and financial support, conditional on the number of submissions and available resources, will be provided to graduate students.

The invited speakers will be Axel H. Börsch-Supan (Munich Center for the Economics of Aging, Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy) and Alberto Holly (Université de Lausanne). The welcome address will be given by Guglielmo Weber (University of Padua).

We hope you are interested in submitting to the conference and we kindly ask you to circulate the call for papers among your colleagues.

Best regards,
The organizing committee

Mental Health Across Europe

Liam has been posting recently about mental health. One source of data on this is international surveys which allow cross country comparisons. Share is especially useful in this regard. The following graph demonstrates that there is a considerable amount of variation in Europe with respect to depressive symptoms. This index is derived from 12 binary variables measuring the presence or absence of the following: depression, pessimism, wishing death, guilt, sleeplessness, disinterest, irritability, loss of appetite, fatigue, lack of concentration, lack of enjoyment, and tearfulness. The EURO-D scale has been previously validated (Prince et al., 1999), and seems like it should be less susceptible to the usual problems associated with self assessments as it directly measures the presence of these symptoms. I have just pooled the data from the first two waves and some countries are in here only once, and I have ordered the countries in the sample according to the mean of this scale. Nevertheless, the spread is pretty striking. At the individual level anything above 3 is potentially indicative of clinical levels of depression, which is very worrying for Italy, Israel, Spain and Poland. One explanation for these differences relates to the prevalence of different types of social networks, a topic I will post about again at some stage.

Of course this is before the recession. Angus Deaton’s paper on wellbeing and the financial crisis has already been mentioned here.

Prayer can reduce depression: some econometric evidence

There has been a lot of work in recent years by economists on the determinants of people’s well-being. Many of these determinants are not something you can do much about at least in the short run, like income or health.

In a paper in press in Social Science and Medicine I look at the effect of prayer on the number of symptoms of depression recorded by individuals in the previous month. The data is from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) . I use the Euro-D scale which was designed to measure the incidence of depression symptons in an older population – it is not a diagnostic scale.

There are many studies looking at associations between well-being or mental health and either religion affiliation or devotion. Freud took a rather dim view of religion and this has cast a long shadow on the issue. As far as I can see, he did not do any serious data analysis so its unclear to me why one should put any weight on his views.

A problem of course in this literature, is whether one can infer anything causal. After all, people who are feeling down might easily turn to religion as a response. I use instrumental variable estimation to tackle this issue.

This turns a positive association (prayer positively correlated with depression) to a negative one i.e. prayer reduces the number of depression symptoms. This is not that surprising in a sense: if prayer made you more miserable on average, you would have an incentive not to do it. The results are robust to various combinations of instruments.

The magnitude of the effect (of praying at least daily) is comparable to that associated with different marital statuses, about half that of being female and twice as big as the effect of being unemployed.

I speculate on the possible mechanisms behind this effect, noting that it may not be the religious aspect per se. There is increasing evidence of the benefits of meditition and mindfulness based techniques for reducing depression and anxiety.

Diabetes In Ireland

This is purely for illustration (due to relatively small numbers (~750) , and I'm mixing data from two waves), but it at least seems that diabetes is more common in Leinster. The overall rate of 7-8% seems low to me, at least for this age cohort (over 50s). I've also broken down the rate by type of area. Again not to be taken too seriously, the confidence intervals are wide. The data is from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe see www.share-project.org. The full panel data set comprises over 30,000 individuals across Europe, has modules on too many domains to mention here, and is a fantastic resource for anyone interesed in social science. A summary of the Irish results from the first wave is available here. Data collection for a life history wave has just been completed.

Type Of Area Of Residence	Diabetes Prevalence Rate
A Big City	0.11
The Suburbs Or Outskirts Of A Big City	0.07
A Large Town	0.07
A Small Town	0.12
A Rural Area Or Village	0.06
Average	0.07

Anchoring Vignettes: Sample Selection Issues and Longitudinal Aspects

Omar Paccagnella from the Dept. of Economics at the University of Padua has a working paper on "Anchoring Vignettes with Sample Selection". The paper aims at extending the standard (hopit) model for estimating vignettes in order to allow the specification of some selection variables.

The concern about sample selection arises from when a respondent in the SHARE (ageing) study completes the main CAPI questionnaire, but does not fill in the extra questions that they have been randomly assigned to - which are anchoring vignettes. Paccagnella states that fitting models to the observed sample ignoring potential selection bias may lead to inconsistent estimates. His findings show that there is evidence of sample selection effects even in the case of high rates of collected vignettes (higher than 85%), but in such cases the bias induced by the selection mechanism is negligible.

Paccagnella also has a working paper in presentation format: on using anchoring vignettes in a longitudinal context, examining work disability reporting from SHARE. This work concludes that when moving from one wave of the SHARE study to the other, that individual thresholds shift upwards and that respondents assess a work limitation less easily in 2006 than in 2004. Also, variations over time in work disability reporting are reported to be much stronger than variations across countries.

Paccagnella has also written on using vignettes to enhance the comparability of self-rated life satisfaction, using the SHARE data. And a paper on voluntary private health insurance for the over-50's, also using the SHARE data.

Irish SHARE

The Irish SHARE website is revamped and will be developing throughout the year

http://geary.ucd.ie/share/index.php

The website above has links to the first results of the Irish study as well as an article written about them in the Sunday Tribune. Some highlights of the results include the chronic illness distributions, early retirement data and many other findings. Various researchers will be following up on this over the next few years

Irish SHARE results

Newspaper article about the results of the SHARE study in Ireland. I will post more about this over the week.

here