Complexities of health and acceptance of electronic health records for the Austrian elderly population.

We examine the personal health situation and how the complexities thereof affect the elderly Austrians' willingness to accept electronic health records (EHR). Using data from the sixth wave of the SHARE survey in Austria, we find the complexity of individual health problems and the social integration of individuals influencing the acceptance of EHR. The higher the degree of multimorbidity, the more medication is prescribed, and the higher the number of hospital admissions, the higher is the acceptance of EHR. Having a chronical illness has a positive effect on EHR acceptance, whereas a pessimistic attitude and lack of joy in life, as indicators of depressive mood, have a negative impact. The results are mainly driven by women and younger patients aged between 50 and 70. People with poor social connection express lower acceptance of EHR.

Does robotization affect job quality? Evidence from European regional labor markets.

Whereas there are recent papers on the effect of robot adoption on employment and wages, there is no evidence on how robots affect non-monetary working conditions. We explore the impact of robot adoption on several domains of non-monetary working conditions in Europe over the period 1995-2005 combining information from the World Robotics Survey and the European Working Conditions Survey. In order to deal with the possible endogeneity of robot deployment, we employ an instrumental variables strategy, using the robot exposure by sector in other developed countries as an instrument. Our results indicate that robotization has a negative impact on the quality of work in the dimension of work intensity and no relevant impact on the domains of physical environment or skills and discretion.

Attitudes of elderly Austrians towards new technologies: communication and entertainment versus health and support use.

We use data from SHARE (The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) in Austria to investigate attitudes towards new technologies in information and communication technology. The technologies can significantly facilitate the daily lives of an ageing population. In Austria, in wave 6 in 2015, an additional paper-and-pencil questionnaire was implemented which asked details about attitudes towards different technological innovations. From these questions, we develop a binary attitude score which indicates positive attitudes towards new technologies. In probit estimations, the attitude score is related to different demographic and health variables. Our main results indicate that strong gender differences in attitudes towards new technologies exist: men value communication and entertainment devices more, whereas women's attitudes are more positive towards devices that include a specific health or support value. Furthermore, while older cohorts value entertainment devices less than younger ones, no such pattern exists for health and support systems.

Decomposing international gender test score differences.

In this paper, we decompose worldwide PISA mathematics and reading scores. While mathematics scores are still tilted towards boys, girls have a larger advantage in reading over boys. Girls' disadvantage in mathematics is increasing over the distribution of talents. Our decomposition shows that part of this increase can be explained by an increasing trend in productive endowments and learning productivity, although the largest part remains unexplained. Countries' general level of gender (in)equality also contributes to girls' disadvantage. For reading, at the upper end of the talent distribution, girls' advantage can be fully explained by differences in learning productivity, but this is not so at lower levels.

The Causal Effect of Education on Health: What is the Role of Health Behaviors?

We investigate the causal effect of education on health and the part of it that is attributable to health behaviors by distinguishing between short-run and long-run mediating effects: whereas, in the former, only behaviors in the immediate past are taken into account, in the latter, we consider the entire history of behaviors. We use two identification strategies: instrumental variables based on compulsory schooling reforms and a combined aggregation, differencing, and selection on an observables technique to address the endogeneity of both education and behaviors in the health production function. Using panel data for European countries, we find that education has a protective effect for European men and women aged 50+. We find that the mediating effects of health behaviors-measured by smoking, drinking, exercising, and the body mass index-account in the short run for around a quarter and in the long run for around a third of the entire effect of education on health.

Can pro-marriage policies work? An analysis of marginal marriages.

Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, one must distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the absence of a state intervention (average marriage). We exploit the suspension of a cash-on-hand marriage subsidy in Austria to examine the differential behavior of marginal and average marriages. The announcement of an impending suspension of this subsidy led to an enormous marriage boom among eligible couples that allows us to locate marginal marriages. Applying a difference-in-differences approach, we show that marginal marriages are surprisingly as stable as average marriages but produce fewer children, children later in marriage, and children who are less healthy at birth.

Does education improve cognitive performance four decades after school completion?

We study the effect of secondary education on cognitive performance toward the end of working age. We exploit the exogenous variation in years of schooling arising from compulsory schooling reforms implemented in six European countries during the 1950s and 1960s. Using data of individuals, approximately age 60, from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we assess the causal effect of education on memory, fluency, numeracy, and orientation-to-date. Furthermore, we study education effects on cognitive decline. We find a positive impact of schooling on memory scores. One year of education increases the memory score approximately four decades later by about 0.2, which amounts to 10 % of a standard deviation. Furthermore, we find some evidence for a protective effect of schooling on cognitive decline in terms of verbal fluency.

Long-run Relations between Childhood Shocks and Health in Late Adulthood-Evidence from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe.

In this article, we address the long-run associations between childhood shocks and health in late adulthood. Applying a life-course approach and data from SHARE, we estimate direct and indirect relations of shocks like relocation, dispossession, or hunger and health outcomes after 50 years of age. Having lived in a children's home, in a foster family, or having suffered a period of hunger turn out to be the most detrimental. Using a finite mixture model, which allows to classify the correlations between shocks and later health into a priori unknown groups, we show that some adverse shocks show opposite relations for specific groups. (JEL codes: J1, I12, J13).

Gender Wage Inequality and Economic Growth: Is There Really a Puzzle?-A Comment.

Seguino (2000) shows that gender wage discrimination in export-oriented semi-industrialized countries might be fostering investment and growth in general. While the original analysis does not have internationally comparable wage discrimination data, we replicate the analysis using data from a meta-study on gender wage discrimination and do not find any evidence that more discrimination might further economic growth-on the contrary: if anything the impact of gender inequality is negative for growth. Standing up for more gender equality-also in terms of wages-is good for equity considerations and at least not negative for growth.

Great expectations: Past wages and unemployment durations.

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm-fixed components in their wages, they might be misled about the overall wage distribution. Such misperceptions may lead to unjustified high reservation wages, resulting in overly long unemployment durations. We examine the influence of previous wages on unemployment durations for workers after exogenous lay-offs and, using Austrian administrative data, we find that younger workers are, in fact, unemployed longer if they profited from high firm-fixed components in the past. We interpret our findings as evidence for overconfidence generated by imperfectly observed productivity.