The LSE ALPHA research group has a joint seminar series with the Centre for Global Ageing at King’s "LSE ALPHA/KCL Global Ageing and Health Seminar"
Does education improve mental health? Evidence from a compulsory schooling reform in Britain
Speaker: Vahé Nafilyan
Date: Wednesday30th November 2016
Time: 4pm with refreshments
Location: Kings College London, Room S-2.25 at the Strand Building.
Please note: Room S -2.25 is in the second basement: If you enter through the main doors of the Strand Building, please take the elevator or stairs down to Level -2. Room -2.25 will be the first room on your left.
Abstract:
We examine the long-term effects of raising the minimum school leaving age on long-term mental health outcomes, exploiting a compulsory schooling reform in Britain in 1972, which raised the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16. Using a regression discontinuity design, we provide robust evidence that although the reform increased educational attainment and schooling it paradoxically increased the probability of a depression diagnosis and other mental health problems in adulthood, especially among women. Our results suggest that an additional year of schooling may have unanticipated and negative consequences on mental health for some individuals. We explore potential explanations including lower returns to schooling for some groups compared to competing opportunities (e.g., vocational education, training or employment) and their impact on early career and fertility decisions, which could lead to long-lasting detrimental consequences for mental health.
Future events, please save the date!
25th January 2017
Speaker: Tim Bruckner
Location: Kings College London, Room TBC.
15th February 2017
Speaker: George Ploubidis
Location: LSE, Room TBC.
22nd March 2017
Presentation on Social investment and LTC
Speaker: Bernard Casey
Location: Kings College London, Room TBC.
24th May 2017
Speaker: Emily Freeman
Location: LSE, Room TBC.
Please check the ALPHA website for updates on these events. They are free and open to all, registration is not required.
Work-family histories and extended working lives across cohorts in the UK
Speaker: Dr Giorgio Di Gessa
Productive ageing in familialistic welfare regimes: the determinants of productive participation in Italy and South Korea
Speaker: Ginevra Floridi
Abstract:Overwhelming concerns with prolonging working lives as a response to population ageing discount the fact that older people remain economically productive beyond paid work. This is especially true in familialistic welfare regimes, where families are assumed to be the main source of support, and women’s and older people’s contributions to informal service provision are substantial.
Broadening the definition of productivity to include work, volunteering, grandchild and adult care, this study investigates the individual and family circumstances determining participation in such activities in later life in Italy and South Korea. These ageing familialistic welfare regimes have been chosen because of differences in the relative economic and social security of older people, which have led them to assume family roles as ‘breadwinners’ in Italy and as ‘dependents’ in Korea.
The data consist in four waves each of two highly comparable surveys, the Italian sample of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA). Longitudinal analyses using random-effects models suggest that older people’s productive contributions respond to familial need in both settings. Interesting differences between the two countries are found in the way socioeconomic status and personal circumstances shape productive roles, with Italians participating mainly out of opportunity, and Koreans participating largely out of necessity.
The study fills a gap in the longitudinal study of later-life activity determinants, and suggests interesting ways in which the relative position of older people in society may affect participation in familialistic settings.
Is Life Expectancy Really Falling for the Least Educated? Challenges in Measuring Trends in Health Disparities.
Speaker: Professor Jennifer Dowd
Recent public health studies made headlines reporting that life expectancy had declined over time for some subgroups in the U.S, particularly for White women with less than a high school education. These findings were understandably alarming, leading some to make analogies to the losses in life expectancy in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We propose an alternative explanation, whereby lower life expectancies and higher mortality rates emerge as an artefact of a phenomenon they call “lagged selection bias.” In this case, lagged selection bias arises from the fact that access to education expanded dramatically for Whites in the United States over the first half of the 20th century. Using historical data on education and mortality in the U.S., the paper shows how under reasonable assumptions about stable mortality differences by early life social class, life expectancy for those with less than a high school education can appear to “fall” even though in fact mortality has improved for every group. Failure to acknowledge lagged selection bias can have important policy implications, since it can misattribute explanations for these trends to contemporary changes in policy or the economy when the trends are actually due to changing social dynamics around entry into education decades prior.
What is Population Ageing and what drives it?
Speaker: Professor Mike Murphy
For many countries, the major demographic concern is population ageing, not growth. Population structures and population aging are determined solely by the population’s history of fertility, mortality and migration. There is a pressing need to understand the underlying demographic determinants since policies to influence population ageing by stimulating both fertility and immigration have been advocated. Primacy has usually been given to fertility decline, based on stable population models and increasingly on use of population projections. However, Samuel Preston and co-authors have argued that improvements in cohort survivorship were the most important factor in high income countries and that mortality and fertility declines had similar impacts in low income ones. We discuss the basis of these estimates and potential explanations for apparently contradictory findings that include: the index of ageing differs; results to date are presented for narrow time periods that may be atypical; and whether these two approaches actually measure the same underlying concept. We present long-run analyses of the relative contribution of cohort births, mortality and net migration to population ageing in two European countries using the method of Preston et. al., England & Wales and Sweden. We establish the conditions under which valid long-term model estimates may be made and compare these findings with the main alternative approach that compares population projections with fixed and varying rates of fertility and mortality.
The revolution of adult longevity
Speaker: Professor Jean-Marie Robine (INSERM & EPHE, Paris and Montpellier)
This seminar discussed the current adult longevity revolution. The number of centenarians is doubling on average every ten years in developed countries, introducing a “fourth age group” and fundamentally changing the age distribution of OECD populations. What should we assume in our models for future life expectancy? Are there limits to growing older and if so where would they be? Jean-Marie Robine discussed the consequences and the dynamics of the emergence of new age groups and how this will affect societies which have traditionally been organized in three age groups (young people, working age people and the elderly people). What does ageing well mean in this context? Policy makers and researchers need to consider that the ageing process differs between men and women, between socio-economic groups and by other individual characteristics. Another challenge is to find ways to ensure that longer lives are not increasingly spent in bad health and disability. The seminar also explored what a society based on four age groups could look like.