An adequate theory of Life Satisfaction (LS) needs to take account of both factors that tend to stabilise LS and those that change it. The most widely accepted theory in the recent past – set-point theory – focussed solely on stability (Brickman and Campbell, 1971; Lykken and Tellegen, 1996). That theory is now regarded as inadequate by most researchers, given that national panel surveys in several ...
Despite the prevalence of government surveillance systems around the world, causal evidence on their social and economic consequences is lacking. Using county-level variation in the number of Stasi informers within Socialist East Germany during the 1980s and accounting for potential endogeneity, we show that more intense regional surveillance led to lower levels of trust and reduced social activity ...
Using survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) this paper analyses to what extent alternative income sources, reactions within the household context, and redistribution by the state attenuate earnings losses after job displacement. Applying propensity score matching and fixed effects estimations, we find high individual earnings losses after job displacement and only limited convergence. ...
DIW Berlin short-term economic forecast: German GDP will increase by 1.9 percent in 2016, 1.0 percent in 2017, and 1.6 percent in 2018 – Brexit decision temporarily hindering growth – unemployment continues to fall, but wage increases are also slowing down – public budgets will end all three years with surpluses According to the latest economic forecast from the German Institute ...
Dr. Fichtner, Germany’s economic development has become less stable overall. How long will it remain this way? Our prognosis for 2017 has changed quite a bit since June: we now predict that the Brexit decision will have a significant negative impact on growth, and have thus lowered the projected growth rate from 1.4 percent to 1 percent. Growth will turn out to be slightly higher ...
We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, as in the case of the absolute mean deviation, it can be solved by an interior-point algorithm. If it is quasiconvex, as in case of the Gini coefficient, ...
China's government is promoting the shift towards a consumption-based economy since a few years. The explicit goal to significantly raise the percentage of wages in the national household income is integral part of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15). The changes in the economic strategy are likely to affect the attractiveness of the country to foreign investors. In this paper, we raise the hypothesis ...
