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We Are Largely Responsible for Our Own Happiness

The Impact of Lengthening the School Day on Substance Abuse and Crime: Evidence from a German High School Reform

In the 2000s, a major educational reform in Germany reduced the academic high school duration by one year while keeping constant the total number of instructional hours before graduation. The instructional hours from the eliminated school year shifted to lower grade levels, which increased the time younger students spend at school. This study explores the impact of the reform on youth crime rates and ...

Refugees have a strong educational orientation: eight questions for Jürgen Schupp

Mr. Schupp, more than 2300 refugees above the age of 18 have been interviewed in a representative survey. Which countries do these refugees come from? For the first time, we have drawn a representative picture of the influx of refugees to Germany between January 2013 and January 2016. The large majority of refugees in our sample—about 60 percent—came from Syria, but we also have ...

IT and communication technologies dominate adolescent downtime

Today’s teenagers spend their free time very differently than they did 15 years ago: engagement with IT and communications technologies is now their most significant leisure activity. Representative statistics based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) longitudinal study indicate that Internet and computer-based recreation plays a major role for more than 95 percent of all 17-yearolds ...

Forced Migration, Arrival in Germany, and First Steps toward Integration

A new representative survey of a total of 4,500 recently arrived refugees to Germany conducted by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the Research Centre of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF-FZ), and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) has generated an entirely new database for analyzing forced migration and the ...

Refugees Have a Strong Educational Orientation: Eight Questions for Jürgen Schupp

IT and Communication Technologies Dominate Adolescent Downtime

Today’s teenagers spend their free time very differently than they did 15 years ago: engagement with IT and communications technologies is now their most significant leisure activity. Representative statistics based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) longitudinal study indicate that Internet and computer-based recreation plays a major role for more than 95 percent of all 17-year-olds in Germany, ...

Classification Trees and Heterogeneous Moment-Based Models

BAMS is a joint seminar by the DIW Berlin, the Hertie School of Governance, the HU Berlin and the WZB.

Stationary Changes in Long-Run Energy Commodity Prices

Situated at the intersection of the literatures on speculative storage and non-renewable commodity scarcity, this paper considers whether changes in persistence have occurred in long-run U.S. prices of the energy commodities crude oil, natural gas and bituminous coal. We allow for a structural break when testing for a break in persistence to avoid a change in the stochastic properties of prices being ...

Personality Development in Old Age Relates to Physical Health and Cognitive Performance: Evidence from the Berlin Aging Study II

We examine how late-life personality development relates to overall morbidity as well as specific performance-based indicators of physical and cognitive functioning in 1,232 older adults in the Berlin Aging Study II (aged 65-88 years). Latent growth models indicated that, on average, neuroticism and conscientiousness decline over time, whereas extraversion and openness increase and agreeableness remains ...