Overview
SHARE is a multidisciplinary, cross-national, longitudinal panel survey of individuals aged 50+ across European countries (and Israel), founded and coordinated by Axel Börsch-Supan. It was deliberately built as the European analogue to the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), and is ex ante harmonized with them so that aging, health, and retirement can be compared directly across the three survey families. Wave 1 (2004) covered approximately 31,000 individuals in 11 countries: Austria, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Denmark, Greece, Switzerland, and Belgium. Biennial waves have run since — Wave 2 (2006–07), Wave 3 (2008–09), Wave 4 (2011–12), and onward to Wave 9 (2021–22) — progressively expanding to nearly 30 participating countries spanning the EU, Switzerland, and Israel, and accumulating more than 140,000 respondents. Data include health status (self-reported, diagnoses, grip strength, walking speed, Euro-D depression scale), socioeconomic status, labor-force participation, wealth, social networks (size and composition), and well-being (CASP-12 scale). It is the primary data source for multi-country European research on the economics of aging.
Key Features
- Cross-national comparability: Harmonized questionnaires and protocols allow cross-country comparisons of health and retirement behavior
- HRS/ELSA-harmonized family: ex ante alignment with the U.S. HRS and English ELSA (and other sister surveys) supports direct international comparisons of the 50+ population
- Rich health measures: self-reported health (five-point scale), disease diagnoses, ADLs/IADLs, mobility limitations, grip strength, Euro-D depression scale (0–12), cognitive tests (memory recall, verbal fluency)
- Biomarkers: Wave 6 (2015) added physical-measure and dried-blood-spot collection, enabling objective health and biomarker analysis alongside self-reports
- SHARELIFE retrospective histories: Wave 3 (2008–09) and Wave 7 (2017) collected full retrospective life histories (childhood circumstances, employment, health, and family events), enabling life-course analysis linked to current outcomes
- Institutional variation: Different statutory retirement ages across countries (early retirement: 57 in Italy/France/Greece to no early retirement in Denmark; full retirement: 60–65) enable instrumental-variables identification strategies
- European health insurance context: Unlike the US (where Medicare begins at 65), health insurance in SHARE countries is not age-contingent, making statutory retirement ages cleaner instruments for health-retirement studies
- Social network data: Collects information on social network size and composition (family vs. non-family contacts, formal helpers), enabling research on the employment–social network nexus and the social mediation of retirement effects on cognition
- Research infrastructure: Operated since 2011 as SHARE-ERIC (a European Research Infrastructure Consortium); micro-data are openly available to registered researchers free of charge
Notable Uses
- Retirement and health (Coe and Zamarro 2011): 2SLS using statutory retirement ages as instruments — retirement causally improves self-assessed health by ~1 SD with no effect on depression or cognition. See Health Effects of Retirement.
- Retirement, mental health, and social networks (Börsch-Supan and Schuth 2013): uses SHARE Waves 1–4 to show social-network loss mediates the cognition decline associated with early/disability retirement.
- Pharmaceutical innovation and disability (Lichtenberg 2019): SHARE Wave 6 (45,592 respondents, 11 countries, 31 diseases) shows newer drug launches reduce severe disability (−22%), any limitation (−13%), and ADL limitations (−29%). See Value of Medical Innovation.
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