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Day-Care Availability, Maternal Employment and Satisfaction of Parents: Evidence from Cultural and Policy Variations in Germany

This study investigates how the availability and expansion of childcare services for children aged under 3 years relate to the subjective wellbeing of German mothers and fathers. It extends previous studies by examining in more detail the relationship between day-care availability and use, maternal employment and parental subjective wellbeing during early childhood in a country with expanding childcare ...

Terminal Decline in Well-Being: The Role of Multi-Indicator Constellations of Physical Health and Psychosocial Correlates

Well-being is often relatively stable across adulthood and old age, but typically exhibits pronounced deteriorations and vast individual differences in the terminal phase of life. However, the factors contributing to these differences are not well understood. Using up to 25-year annual longitudinal data obtained from 4,404 now-deceased participants of the nationwide German Socio-Economic Panel Study ...

Changes in Life Satisfaction when Losing One's Spouse: Individual Differences in Anticipation, Reaction, Adaptation and Longevity in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP)

Losing a spouse is among the most devastating events that may occur in people's lives. We use longitudinal data from 1,224 participants in the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) to examine (a) how life satisfaction changes with the experience of spousal loss; (b) whether socio-demographic factors and social and health resources moderate spousal loss-related changes in life satisfaction; and (c) ...

The Linked Employer–Employee Study of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-LEE): Content, Design and Research Potential

Do Media Data Help to Predict German Industrial Production?

In an uncertain world, decisions by market participants are based on expectations. Therefore, sentiment indicators reflecting expectations have a proven track record at predicting economic variables. However, survey respondents largely perceive the world through media reports. Here, we want to make use of that. We employ a rich dataset provided by Media Tenor International, based on sentiment analysis ...

FFTrees: A Toolbox to Create, Visualize, and Evaluate Fast-And-Frugal Decision Trees

Fast-and-frugal trees (FFTs) are simple algorithms that facilitate efficient and accurate decisions based on limited information. But despite their successful use in many applied domains, there is no widely available toolbox that allows anyone to easily create, visualize, and evaluate FFTs. We fill this gap by introducing the R package FFTrees. In this paper, we explain how FFTs work, introduce a new ...

Marginal Employment for Welfare Recipients: Stepping Stone or Obstacle?

Marginal employment (ME) is one of the largest forms of atypical employment in Germany. We analyse whether ME has a ‘stepping stone’ function for unemployed individuals, i.e., whether ME increases the subsequent probability of regular employment. We find differing treatment effects by unemployment duration. According to our results, ME increases the likelihood of regular employment within a 3-year ...

Will You Still Trust Me Tomorrow? The Causal Effect of Terrorism on Social Trust

How do people respond to terrorist events? Exploiting the timing of the 2010 wave of the annual ‘Society Opinion Media’ survey in Sweden, we study the causal effect of the Stockholm bombings of 11 December 2010 on Swedish public opinion. Our main contribution is that we draw explicit attention to the link between terrorist events and individuals’ social trust. While we identify a strong effect on individuals’ ...

Long-Term Growth Perspectives in Japan and the Euro Area

Euro area countries and Japan are confronted with similar challenges. Potential output is on a declining trend in the Euro area, and the decrease started well before the financial crisis. In Japan, low-output growth is a striking feature since many years, despite the unconventional monetary policy stance and numerous fiscal stimulus programs provided by the government. According to a growth accounting ...

Who Is Minding the Kids? New Developments and Lost Opportunities in Reforming the British Early Education Workforce

The last 20 years have seen a substantial increase in enrolment in early childhood education and care (ECEC) in several European countries. The expansion of ECEC services inevitably requires new staff. There is however a tension between a rapid growth of services via the creation of low-paid, low-qualified jobs and the aspiration, voiced unanimously by policy makers, to improve the qualification and ...