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Income Comparisons, Income Adaptation, and Life Satisfaction: How Robust Are Estimates from Survey Data?

Theory suggests that subjective well-being is affected by income comparisons and adaptation to income. Empirical tests of the effects often rely on self-constructed measures from survey data. This paper shows that results can be highly sensitive to simple parameter changes. Using large-scale panel data from Germany and the UK, I report cases where plausible variations in the underlying income type ...

Testing the Easterlin Hypothesis with Panel Data: The Dynamic Relationship Between Life Satisfaction and Economic Growth in Germany and in the UK

Recent studies focused on testing the Easterlin hypothesis (happiness and national income correlate in the cross-section but not over time) on a global level. We make a case for testing the Easterlin hypothesis at the country level where individual panel data allow exploiting important methodological advantages. Novelties of our test of the Easterlin hypothesis are a) long-term panel data and estimation ...

Gesellschaftliche Polarisierung in Deutschland - Ein Überblick über die Fakten und die Hintergründe

Arbeiten trotz Rente: Warum bleiben Menschen im Ruhestand erwerbstätig?

Anreizeffekte und Angebotsinduzierung im Rahmen der Riester-Rente: Eine empirische Analyse geschlechts- und sozialisationsbedingter Unterschiede

In 2001, the voluntary additional Riester pension scheme was implemented in Germany. Financial subsidies should incentivize people to increase their private pension savings. In this paper, we hypothesize that these publicly subsidized savings mainly replace existing not subsidized savings and that supplier induced demand is an important factor. Using data from the Socio-economic Panel we analyze the ...

Status Attainment and Wealth in the United States and Germany

Mobility Regimes and Parental Wealth: The United States, Germany, and Sweden in Comparison

We study the role of parental wealth for children’s educational and occupational outcomes across three types of welfare states and outline a theoretical model that assumes parental wealth to impact offspring’s attainment through two mechanisms, wealth’s purchasing function and its insurance function. We argue that welfare states can limit the purchasing function of wealth, for instance by providing ...

A Note on Risk Aversion and Labour Market Outcomes: Further Evidence from German Survey Data

Risk Aversion and Sorting into Public Sector Employment

This research note uses two German datasets – the large-scale German Socioeconomic Panel and unique data from own student questionnaires – to analyse the relationship between risk aversion and the choice for public sector employment. Main results are (1) more risk-averse individuals sort into public sector employment, (2) the impact of career-specific and unemployment risk attitudes is larger than ...

Cyclical Absenteeism among Private Sector, Public Sector and Self-employed Workers

This research note analyzes differences in the number of absent working days and doctor visits and in their cyclicality between private sector, public sector and self-employed workers. For this purpose, I used large-scale German survey data for the years 1995 to 2007 to estimate random effects negative binomial (count data) models. The main findings are as follows. (i) Public sector workers have on ...