This paper is a contribution to the second World Happiness Report. It makes five main points. 1. Mental health is the biggest single predictor of life-satisfaction. This is so in the UK, Germany and Australia even if mental health is included with a six-year lag. It explains more of the variance of life-satisfaction in the population of a country than physical health does, and much more than unemployment ...
Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the causal effects of music training on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how long-term music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality, time use and ambition using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Our findings suggest ...
We analyze the effect of education on wages using German Socio-Economic Panel data and regional variation in mandatory years of schooling and the supply of schools. This allows us to estimate more than one local average treatment effect and heterogeneous effects for different groups of compliers. Our results are in line with previous studies that do not find an effect of compulsory schooling on wages ...
This study investigates whether the expansion of day-care places for under-three-year-old children in East and West Germany from 2007 to 2011 has improved the subjective wellbeing for mothers and fathers with a youngest child in this age group. We extend existing cross-sectional country comparisons and single country policy evaluations by comparing regional variations over time in two different contexts ...
Mit der von der Bundesregierung in Auftrag gegebenen "Gesamtevaluation ehe- und familienbezogener Leistungen" wurden erstmals zentrale Instrumente der deutschen Familienpolitik systematisch und umfassend evaluiert. Dabei wurden folgende familienpolitische Ziele vorgegeben: die Sicherung der wirtschaftlichen Stabilität der Familien, die bessere Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf, die frühe Förderung ...
Investments in education are of great importance for the competitiveness of the German economy. In particular, early childhood education programs promise high returns - because children can benefit from them even years later and find it easier to acquire new skills. These are the results of research in the field of the economics of education in recent years, at least when high quality programs are ...
