Equal Before Luck? Well-Being Consequences of Personal Deprivation and Transition

Joan Costa-Font, Anna Nicińska, Melcior Rosello-Roig and Joan Costa-i-Font

No 11763, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Past trauma resulting from personal life shocks, especially during periods of particular volatility such as regime transition (or regime change), can give rise to significant long-lasting effects on people’s health and well-being. We study this question by drawing on longitudinal and retrospective data to examine the effect of past exposure to major individual-level shocks (specifically hunger, persecution, dispossession, and exceptional stress) on current measures of an individual’s health and mental well-being. We study the effect of the timing of the personal shocks, alongside the additional effect of ‘institutional uncertainty’ of regime change in post-communist European countries. Our findings are as follows: First, we document evidence of the detrimental effects of shocks on a series of relevant health and well-being outcomes. Second, we show evidence of more pronounced detrimental consequences of such personal shocks experienced by individuals living in formerly communist countries (which accrue to about 8% and 10% in the case of hunger and persecution, respectively) than in non-communist countries. The effects are robust and take place in addition to the direct effects of regime change and shocks.

Keywords: transition shocks; Soviet communism; later life health; health care system. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 H79 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11763.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11763

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().