What You Need to Know When Estimating Monthly Impact Functions: Comment on Hudde and Jacob, “There’s More in the Data!”
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Josef Brüderl, Ansgar Hudde, Marita Jacob Sociological Science December 4, 2025 10.15195/v12.a34 Abstract In life course research, it is common practice to analyze the effects of life events on outcomes. This is usually done by estimating “impact functions.” To date, most studies have estimated yearly impact functions. However, Hudde and Jacob (2023) (hereafter H&J) pointed out that most panel data sets include information on the month of events. Consequently, they proposed exploiting this infor