The authors update previous findings on the total East-West gap in overall life satisfaction and its trend by using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1992 to 2013. Additionally, the East-West gap and its trend are separately analyzed for men and women as well as for four birth cohorts. The results indicate that reported life satisfaction is on average significantly lower in East than in West German federal states and that part of the raw East-West gap is due to differences in household income and unemployment status. The conditional East-West gap decreased in the first years after the German reunification and remained quite stable and sizeable since the mid-nineties. The results further indicate that gender differences are small. But the East-West gap is significantly smaller and shows a trend towards convergence for younger birth cohorts.

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractThe authors address the issue of effectiveness of medical rehabilitation in terms of labor market outcomes by analyzing a large representative administrative panel data set for Germany. The research design focuses on socio-demographic group differences in before-after differences in days with unemployment benefits, days in employment, and labor income of participants in medical rehabilitation. The mean before-after differences indicate that medical rehabilitation is rather ineffective with respect to labor market outcomes, because the number of days with unemployment benefits is larger and the number of working days and labor income are smaller after the rehabilitation than before. The differences in the before-after differences are however large between socio-demographic groups. For example, older participants perform significantly worse and better educated participants have significant better labor market outcomes after the rehabilitation than before, whereas gender differences are small.

Air pollution has been shown to have adverse effects on many health outcomes including respiratory effects, cardiovascular effects, and mortality. However, evidence on the effects of prenatal exposure is still limited. We investigate the causal impact of prenatal exposure to air pollution on neonatal health in Italy in the 2000s. We exploit variation in rainfall shocks to instrument for non‐random air pollution exposure. Our empirical setting combines detailed information on mother's residential location from birth certificates with PM10 concentrations from air pollution monitors. Ten additional units in the average PM10 level (approximately one standard deviation) would decrease birth weight by about 0.5% and gestational age by 0.16%; it would increase the prevalence of low birth weight by 22% and of preterm birth by 16%. The effects are stronger in magnitude for third trimester exposure and for less educated mothers. These findings suggest that the health impacts of air pollution on newborns are unequally distributed in the population.

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