Well-being (life satisfaction or happiness) is a latent variable that is impossible to observe directly. Moreover, it does not have a unit of measurement. Hence, survey questionnaires usually ask people to rate their well-being in different domains. The common practice of comparing well-being by means of averages or linear regressions ignores the fact that well-being is an ordinal variable. Since data ...
This paper assesses how far residential moves can result in improvement or deterioration of the housing and neighbourhood circumstances for families with young children. It uses data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study concentrating on the time between infancy and age 5, 2001 to 2006. First, we ask which families moved home and in what circumstances. We then examine how moving changed several aspects ...
Losing a spouse is among the most devastating events that may occur in people's lives. We use longitudinal data from 1,224 participants in the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) to examine (a) how life satisfaction changes with the experience of spousal loss; (b) whether socio-demographic factors and social and health resources moderate spousal loss-related changes in life satisfaction; and (c) ...
Completely eliminating the sharp rise in the tax rate for middle income households in Germany by changing personal income tax rates would mean estimated annual losses in tax revenue of 35 billion euros, or 1.1 percent of GDP. Taxpayers with high incomes would also benefit from this type of relief. The ten percent of the population with the highest income would have a relief of around 10.4 billion euros—over ...
Mr. Bach, there is growing criticism that the middle income segments are suffering from a tax and social contribution burden that is too heavy. Does the middle class pay a disproportionately high amount of income tax? Actually, the middle class has a relatively low income tax burden. This is because we use the basic personal exemption to shield the subsistence level from taxation, and a range of deductions ...
