Predicting depression in old age: Combining life course data with machine learning.

With ageing populations, understanding life course factors that raise the risk of depression in old age may help anticipate needs and reduce healthcare costs in the long run. We estimate the risk of depression in old age by combining adult life course trajectories and childhood conditions in supervised machine learning algorithms. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we implement and compare the performance of six alternative machine learning algorithms. We analyse the performance of the algorithms using different life-course data configurations. While we obtain similar predictive abilities between algorithms, we achieve the highest predictive performance when employing semi-structured representations of life courses using sequence data. We use the Shapley Additive Explanations method to extract the most decisive predictive patterns. Age, health, childhood conditions, and low education predict most depression risk later in life, but we identify new predictive patterns in indicators of life course instability and low utilization of dental care services.

Public support for tax policies in COVID-19 times: evidence from Luxembourg.

We study attitudes towards the introduction of hypothetical new taxes to finance the cost of the COVID-19 pandemic. We rely on survey data collected in Luxembourg in 2020. The survey asks for the agreement of respondents over: a one-time net wealth tax, an inheritance tax, a temporary solidarity income tax, and a temporary increase in VAT. All questions include different and randomly assigned tax attributes (tax rates and exemption amounts). We find a clear divide with relatively high support for new wealth and inheritance taxes on the one hand and a low support for increases in VAT and income taxes on the other hand. While 58% of respondents agree or strongly agree with a one-time tax levied on net worth, only 24% are in favor of a small increase in VAT. Support for any tax is however negatively associated with the size of the tax as measured by the predicted revenues. Our results indicate that a one-time wealth tax could raise substantial revenues and still garner public support. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10797-022-09744-y.

Do Children Carry the Weight of Divorce?

Relatively few studies have examined the physical health of children who experience parental separation. The few studies on this topic have largely focused on the United States and have used cross-sectional designs. Our study investigates the relationship between parental separation and children's body mass index (BMI) and overweight/obesity risk using the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Treating parental separation as a process, we analyze variations in children's physical health before and after the date of their parents' separation in order to capture potential anticipation, adaptation, delayed, or cumulative effects. We estimate fixed-effects models to account for the potential correlation between children's physical health and unobserved factors associated with parental separation, such as socioeconomic background and other time-invariant parental characteristics. We find no evidence of statistically significant anticipation effects in the build-up to parental separation or of statistically significant changes in children's physical health immediately after separation. However, our results show that in the longer term, the BMI of children whose parents separate significantly deviates from the BMI of children from intact families. Furthermore, this association is especially strong for separations that occur when children are under age 6.

Income inequality and self-rated health status: evidence from the European Community Household Panel.

We examine the effect of income inequality on individuals' self-rated health status in a pooled sample of 11 countries, using longitudinal data from the European Community Household Panel survey. Taking advantage of the longitudinal and cross-national nature of our data, and carefully modeling the self-reported health information, we avoid several of the pitfalls suffered by earlier studies on this topic. We calculate income inequality indices measured at two standard levels of geography (NUTS-0 and NUTS-1) and find consistent evidence that income inequality is negatively related to self-rated health status in the European Union for both men and women, particularly when measured at national level. However, despite its statistical significance, the magnitude of the impact of inequality on health is very small.