Events at CERGE-EI

Giacomo Pasini, Ph.D.

Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy

Venue: Ceska sporitelna Palace, Rytířská 29, Prague 1 (Aging Workforce: Older Workers and Immigrants as New Pillars of Western Economies? conference)

Authors: M. Avendano, L. F. Berkman, A. Brugiavin, and Giacomo Pasini

Abstract: Stress generated by life events can lead to important brain disorders. It is therefore important to understand which life event is a stress risk factor and whether public policies have or not a protective effect with respect to stress. A child birth may be one of those due to the risk of role overload induced by the necessity of combining work and family responsibilities. We use life history data from the third wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) where respondents are asked to report the single most stressful event in their life. For our purposes, we use the data reorganized in a retrospective panel dataset: each respondent contributes as many observations as there are years of age from birth to the age at which they are observed at the moment of the interview. We exploit the panel dimension of the data as well as the possibility to link them to a maternity leave policies dataset to estimate the causal effect of childbirth and job interruptions on stress incidence.  Our main finding is that being in the year a child is born or in the baby’s first year of life are psychosocial risk factors comparable in magnitude to other, more studied life course events. Moreover, job interruptions have positive effects if taken around childbirth: eight weeks of leave are enough to counterbalance the stress increase due to the birth of a child.

The seminar is co-financed by the European Union.                                                              

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