Using SHARE data from eleven countries, Liudmila Antonova, Tabea Bucher-Koenen and Fabrizio Mazzonna investigate the effects of economic crises that people experience during their prime working age (20-50) on their health later in life. The results show that when comparing individuals that experienced a strong recession (GDP dropped by at least 1%) and those that did not, people that experienced a recession rate their subjective health as worse and have worse objectively measured health. This effect is significantly stronger for people with low levels of education.

In today’s ageing societies, assessing subjective well-being  in later life has gained substantial attention among researchers, as well as among policymakers in the areas of economic, health, and social policies. However, remarkably little is known about how older adults understand their own subjective well-being and related concepts, such as quality of life, and how these concepts differ between different groups of older adults.

The way individuals perceive the state of their health has been found to be a predictor of longevity. Still, very little is known about the role played by genetic and environmental factors on how men and women evaluate their health status at different stages of their life course. Franz et al. (2017) start to fill this gap by using IGEMS data, an international consortium of nine existing longitudinal twin and family studies in Denmark, Sweden, and the US. The sample used included more than 12,000 adult twins ranging from 30- to 85-years-old.