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Adverse life events are major causes of declining health and well-being, but the effects vary across subpopulations. We analyze how the intersection of migration status and sex relates to two main adverse life events—job loss and divorce—thereby affecting individual health and well-being trajectories. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984–2017), we apply descriptive techniques and individual fixed-effects regressions to analyze how job loss and divorce influence the health of immigrants and nonimmigrants. Our results support the hypothesis that immigrants suffer more from adverse life events than nonimmigrants in both the short and the long run. Relative to nonimmigrants, immigrants have a health advantage at younger ages, which becomes a disadvantage at older ages, and this faster decline at older ages is particularly steep among immigrants who experience adverse life events. These results help explain the vanishing health advantage of immigrants by showing that they are exposed to a double disadvantage over the life course: immigrants are more likely than nonimmigrants to suffer from adverse life events, such as job loss, and these events typically have a larger impact on their health. Our findings are the first to provide evidence regarding the consequences of different adverse life events and how they relate to the intersection of migration status and sex. Moreover, our results highlight the importance of intersectional analyses in research on immigrant health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extension of late working life has been proposed as a potential remedy for the challenges of aging societies. For Germany, surprisingly little is known about trends and social inequalities in the length of late working life. We use data from the German Microcensus to estimate working life expectancy from age 55 onward for the 1941-1955 birth cohorts. We adjust our calculations of working life expectancy for working hours and present results for western and eastern Germany by gender, education, and occupation. While working life expectancy has increased across cohorts, we find strong regional and socioeconomic disparities. Decomposition analyses show that among males, socioeconomic differences are predominantly driven by variation in employment rates; among women, variation in both employment rates and working hours are highly relevant. Older eastern German women have longer working lives than older western German women, which is likely attributable to the German Democratic Republic legacy of high female employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, mortality was considerably higher in the former East Germany than in West Germany. The gap narrowed rapidly after German reunification. The convergence was particularly strong for women, to the point that Eastern women aged 50-69 now have lower mortality despite lower incomes and worse overall living conditions. Prior research has shown that lower smoking rates among East German female cohorts born in the 1940s and 1950s were a major contributor to this crossover. However, after 1990, smoking behavior changed dramatically, with higher smoking intensity observed among women in the eastern part of Germany. We forecast the impact of this changing smoking behavior on East-West mortality differences and find that the higher smoking rates among younger East German cohorts will reverse their contemporary mortality advantage. Mortality forecasting methods that do not account for smoking would, perhaps misleadingly, forecast a growing mortality advantage for East German women. Experience from other countries shows that smoking can be effectively reduced by strict anti-smoking policies. Instead, East Germany is becoming an example warning of the consequences of weakening anti-smoking policies and changing behavioral norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how having children influences parents' subjective well-being ("happiness") has great potential to explain fertility behavior. We study parental happiness trajectories before and after the birth of a child, using large British and German longitudinal data sets. We account for unobserved parental characteristics using fixed-effects models and study how sociodemographic factors modify the parental happiness trajectories. Consistent with existing work, we find that happiness increases in the years around the birth of a first child and then decreases to before-child levels. Moreover, happiness increases before birth, suggesting that the trajectories may capture not only the effect of the birth but also the broader process of childbearing, which may include partnership formation and quality. Sociodemographic factors strongly modify this pattern. Those who have children at older ages or who have more education have a particularly positive happiness response to a first birth; and although having the first two children increases happiness, having a third child does not. The results, which are similar in Britain and Germany, suggest that having up to two children increases happiness, and mostly for those who have postponed childbearing. This pattern is consistent with the fertility behavior that emerged during the second demographic transition and provides new insights into low and late fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The German East-West mortality difference narrowed rapidly after the 1990 unification, particularly for women. We analyse recent trends for women aged 50–89 years and document for the first time lower mortality in the East. We study how smoking contributes to this cross-over.Methods We analyse mortality by cause for women aged 50–89 over the years 1992–2009 for the East and West Germany, excluding Berlin. We compare the East-West mortality rate ratio (MRR) for total mortality and after removing smoking-attributable mortality using the indirect Preston-Glei-Wilmoth method.Results In the early 1990s mortality was higher in the East. By 2000 mortality for ages 50–64 had declined below that of the West and remained lower thereafter. For example, from 1992–94 to 2005–09 the MRR for ages 55–59 declined from 1.27 to 0.87. Smoking explains a third of the MRR change for ages 50–64, and when smoking-attributable deaths are removed the mortality cross-over vanishes. For example, non-smoking-attributable MRR for ages 55–59 is 1.03 in 2005–09. For ages 65–89 smoking matters less, and mortality remains higher in the East.Conclusions We show for the first time that mortality for middle-aged women is lower in the former East Germany than in the West. Prior studies have documented convergence and suggested improving living standards and medical care as mechanisms. We show that much of the convergence, and the cross-over, are attributable to smoking. The seeds for the female East-West mortality cross-over were planted before the unification, when the women now aged 50–64 adopted their smoking behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]