Malgorzata Mikucka

Universität Mannheim · MZES

Objective Evidence on how individual characteristics and distancing policies during the first wave of COVID-19 together influenced health behaviours is scarce. The objective of this study is to fill in this gap by studying how the propensity to engage in protective behaviours in Europe was shaped by the interplay of individual characteristics and n...

OBJECTIVES: Evidence on how individual characteristics and distancing policies during the first wave of COVID-19 together influenced health behaviours is scarce. The objective of this study is to fill in this gap by studying how the propensity to engage in protective behaviours in Europe was shaped by the interplay of individual characteristics and...

Objectives To date, little is known on how policies and individual vulnerability affected the prevalence of protective behaviour. The objective of this study is to examine the effect of policies and individual vulnerability on the prevalence of protective behaviours.Design Data on the individual behaviour in 27 countries come from the “Corona Surve...

Objective This study analyzes the dynamics of health associated with the transition to first marriage and remaining in marriage up to 24 years in order to estimate the protective effect of heterosexual marriage (compared to being never married, including the unpartnered, partnered, and cohabiting) on physical, mental, and self-rated health. Backgr...

This paper analyses trajectories of life satisfaction among elderly people in various family situations and tests whether the disadvantage related to being single or childless increases (as predicted by cumulative (dis)advantage hypothesis) or reduces (consistently with age-as-leveler hypothesis) when people get older. The results show that the dis...

This research studied the relationship between parenthood and life satisfaction in Switzerland. We tested predictions derived from set-point theory, the economic model of parenthood, the approaches that underscore work–family conflict and the psychological rewards from parenthood, and the ‘taste for children’ theory. We used Swiss Household Panel d...

Our study is the first that aims at estimating the intra-individual effect of marital dissolution on mental health, conditional on parenthood status and age of the youngest biological child. We rely on the set point model that predicts a nonlinear, homeostatic self-regulation process with an anticipatory effect and a subsequent recovery phase. Assu...

According to the Negative Endogenous Growth (NEG) model, economic systems are susceptible to economic crises because they produce wealth from the erosion of free and common goods, thus feeding unhappiness, decay in social relations, materialism, and excessive consumption. Our aim is to propose a framework to monitor NEG-type economic growth and to...

As social capital affects many social and economic outcomes, it is important to monitor its changes over time. This study uses WVS-EVS integrated data (1990-2012) to describe the trends of 8 proxies of social capital in 30 Western and Eastern European countries. We found positive trends of trust in others, confidence in public services, and in arme...

Governments across the world seek to promote a better life for their citizens, but thus far scholars have provided contradictory advice. While some argue that economic growth leads to higher subjective well-being, and others argue that it does not, we are the first to specify two conditions that make economic growth compatible with subjective well-...

The evolution over time of subjective well-being (SWB) in transition countries exhibit some peculiarities: greater variations which are more strongly correlated with the trends of GDP relative to other countries. What is the possible role of social trust in predicting such variations? We compare the capacity of the trends of GDP and of social trust...

Recent studies documented that survey data contain duplicate records. In this paper, we assess how duplicate records affect regression estimates, and we evaluate the effectiveness of solutions to deal with them. Results show that duplicates bias the estimated coefficients and standard errors. The chances of obtaining unbiased estimates when data co...

We compare subjective well-being measures collected with a web and telephone surveys to test whether survey mode affects people’s evaluations of their well-being. We use unique nationally representative data from Luxembourg which contains five measures of subjective well-being collected through web and telephone surveys. Oaxaca decomposition and mu...

BACKGROUND Strong relationships with relatives may alleviate the consequences of stressful experiences, but the evidence documenting such 'buffering effect' during parenthood is scarce. OBJECTIVE This paper investigated the buffering effect of relationships with relatives during parenthood in Switzerland. We tested whether relationships with relati...

This investigation examined whether the life satisfaction advantage of married over unmarried people decreased over the past 3 decades and whether the changes in contextual gender specialization explained this trend. Contextual gender specialization was defined as a country-year-specific share of married women who fully specialize in household work...

This article presents issues relevant for including employment status and occupational position in analyses of survey data. It describes the employment statuses distinguished by International Labour Organization (ILO) and discusses their internal heterogeneity and possible overlaps. Further, it presents the International Standard Classification of...

The literature on life satisfaction dynamics during parenthood relies largely on data from Western countries. This paper tests if previously described empirical patterns and theoretical models are general by confronting them with estimates from Russia. We apply fixed effect regression for panel data to the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey data...

To ascertain the effect of different institutional settings on the happiness-parenthood link, new studies examining various national contexts are needed. The current research extends previous analyses of the consequences of parenthood for life satisfaction by considering a new set of panel data, that is, the Swiss Household Panel. Our aim is to asc...

This investigation examined whether the life satisfaction advantage of married over unmarried persons decreased over the last three decades, and whether the changes in the contextual gender specialization explained this trend. The author used representative data from the World Values Survey–European Values Study (WVS–EVS)-integrated data set for 87...

The literature on life satisfaction dynamics during parenthood relies largely on data from Western countries. This paper tests the generality of previous conclusions and theoretical models by confronting them with estimates from Russia. We apply fixed effects regression for panel data to the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey data from years 199...

To what extent is economic growth liable to improve people's subjective well-being in the long run? Recent studies identified three possible answers: economic growth matters a great deal; economic growth does not matter at all; economic growth matters, but other things matter more. Each of these conclusions has different policy implications to prom...

Although today parenting is largely a choice, having children causes stress. Parents, especially of young children, are tired, sleep deprived, and stressed (Evenson and Simon, 2005, Umberson et al., 2010). They experience financial strain (Stanca, 2012) and time pressure. Childcare, an activity slightly more enjoyable than housework (Kahneman et al...

Growing divorce and falling marriage rates in contemporary societies suggest that the institution of marriage is in crisis. Indeed, analyses for United States suggest that the quality of marriages, as well as the well-being premium of married over the never married persons decreased over time (Amato et al., 2003, Corra et al., 2009, Glenn, 1991, Gl...

Given the relevant role of social capital for many real-life dimensions such as health, well-being, democracy, and economic growth, it is particularly relevant to monitor its changes over time and across countries. This is particularly urgent in the light of previous empirical evidence and the theoretical expectation that civil society erodes. Prev...

This book offers a comprehensive review of how social relationships foster well-being and health at various stages of life. By explicitly focusing on three main stages of a person's life, this book guides the reader through the influences of social relationships on the quality of life in adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Moreover, the book inves...

The paper tests whether the well-being cost of own unemployment is higher in individualistic countries and among persons with more individualistic orientations. I consider two dimensions of individualism: family support and self-reliance. I adopt a multilevel regression methodology on data of the European Values Study (2008) for 42 European countri...

This study is the first to verify with longitudinal data on individual work histories some of the statements concerning changes in the Polish labor market during and after the postcommunist transition. Specifically, it describes the dynamics of interrupting employment and resuming paid work after an interruption in Poland in the period 1988-2008. I...

This study is the first to verify with longitudinal data on individual work histories some of the statements concerning changes in the Polish labor market during and after the postcommunist transition. Specifically, it describes the dynamics of interrupting employment and resuming paid work after an interruption in Poland in the period 1988-2008. I...

Whereas it is known that employment affects individual well-being, the literature on the effect of homemaking is so far inconclusive. The paper investigates the effect of being a housewife on well-being of women, using European Values Study data for 36 European countries (year 2008) and multilevel regression methodology. Results show that the effec...

Subjective well-being literature shows that higher unemployment rate corresponds to lower psychological cost of own unemployment. The goal of the paper is to deepen the understanding of this regularity by investigating the role played by the work ethics and the strength of family ties. I analyze the European Values Study data (2008) for 36 countrie...

In survey research the parental leave beneficiaries are usually coded as either employed or inactive. An exception is the European Labor Force Survey (EU-LFS), which includes parental leave among other forms of being employed but temporarily not working. This paper explores classification of parental leave takers in EU-LFS. We show that classific...

The aim of this article is to assess the difference between East and West European countries with respect to women’s involvement in housework. I use the rational choice theory to model individual-level mechanisms that determine what share of the household’s chores is done by the female partner, and perform a multilevel regression test using Europea...

The article investigates the impact of child care–related policy solutions on the employment probability of married and cohabiting women of reproductive age in twenty-five European countries. The theoretical framework is the rational choice theory, which allows modeling of particular policy solutions such as factors influencing costs or benefits of...

To address the issue of infant mortality as an important health indicator, we systematically analyzed trends in infant mortality in five central and eastern European (CEE) countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia). Infant mortality rates (per 1,000 live births) and trends were computed using the World Health Organizatio...