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DIW Discussion Papers 654 / 2006
Empirical studies on the earnings effects of tobacco use have found significant wage penalties attached to smoking. We produce evidence that suggests that these estimates are significantly upward biased. The bias arises from a general failure in the literature to control for the past smoking behavior of individuals. 2SLS earnings estimates show that the smoking wage penalty is reduced by as much as ...
2006| Silke Anger, Michael Kvasnicka
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DIW Discussion Papers 650 / 2006
In Germany, processes can be observed that have long been out of keeping with the principle of equality of opportunity. Unemployment is concentrated in the structurally weak peripheral areas, in Eastern Germany in particular; emigration of young and better-educated people to the West is not diminishing, but contrary to expectation is again on the increase; aging pro-cesses have set in already, and ...
2006| Annette Spellerberg, Denis Huschka, Roland Habich
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DIW Discussion Papers 639 / 2006
Using data from the long-running German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), this paper provides evidence that life goals matter substantially to subjective well-being (SWB). Nonzero sum goals, which include commitment to family, friends and social and political involvement, promote life satisfaction. Zero sum goals, including commitment to career success and material gains, appear detrimental to life ...
2006| Bruce Headey
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DIW Discussion Papers 630 / 2006
Germany is known to have one of the lowest fertility rates among Western European countries and also relatively low employment rates of mothers with young children. Although these trends have been observed during the last decades, the German public has only recently begun discussing these issues. In order to reverse these trends, the German government recently passed a reform of the parental leave ...
2006| C. Katharina Spieß, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 620 / 2006
This paper studies the politico-economic reasons for the refusal of a proposed compulsory flood insurance scheme in Germany. It provides the rationale for such scheme and outlines the basic features of a market-orientated design. The main reasons for the political down-turn of this proposal were the misperceived costs of a state guarantee, legal objections against a compulsory insurance, distributional ...
2006| Reimund Schwarze, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 610 / 2006
We analyse the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a family headed by a single mother. Growing up in a non-intact family in Germany is associated with worse outcomes in models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and educational performance. But once endogeneity is accounted for, whether by using sibling-difference estimators ...
2006| Marco Francesconi, Stephen P. Jenkins, Thomas Siedler
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DIW Discussion Papers 609 / 2006
The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals' attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique natural experiment that allows us to conduct such a study. Using data from the German General Social Survey ...
2006| Helmut Rainer, Thomas Siedler
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DIW Discussion Papers 608 / 2006
In most industrialized countries, more people than ever are having to cope with the burden of caring for elderly parents. This paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact in affecting children's mobility characteristics. A key insight we obtain is that the mobility of young adults crucially depends on the presence of a sibling. Our explanation ...
2006| Helmut Rainer, Thomas Siedler
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DIW Discussion Papers 607 / 2006
An adequate theory of happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) needs to link at least three sets of variables: stable person characteristics (including personality traits), life events and measures of well-being (life satisfaction, positive affects) and ill-being (anxiety, depression, negative affects). It also needs to be based on long term data in order to account for long term change in SWB. By ...
2006| Bruce Headey
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DIW Discussion Papers 606 / 2006
Using micro panel data, labor market transitions are analyzed for the EU-member states by cumulative year-by-year transition probabilities. As female (non-)employment patterns changed more dramatically than male employment in past decades, the analyses mainly refer to female labor supply. In search for important determinants of these transitions, six EU-countries with different labor market-regimes ...
2006| Lutz C. Kaiser