We investigate long-term trends in the intergenerational transmission of education in a low income country undergoing a transition from socialism to a market economy. We draw on evidence from Kyrgyzstan using data from three household surveys collected in 1993, 1998 and 2011. We find that Kyrgyzstan, like Eastern European middle income transition economies, generally maintained high educational mobility, ...
The wrong signal is being sent at the wrong time, writes Marcel Fratzscher in: Financial Times (21st of February 2013) There is a lot of hype about the prospects of an EU-US free trade agreement, especially in the wake of Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last week. Supporters point to the benefits such an agreement could bring to both economies. Yet the costs are likely to outweigh the ...
This cumulative dissertation consists of three contributions that empirically analyse economic risks at the level of the individual and the household from different perspectives. The first analysis "Future public pensions and changing employment patterns across cohorts" aims to quantify the effects of labour market changes and pension reforms across birth cohorts in East and West Germany. The pension ...
Anticipating one's future self is a unique human capacity that contributes importantly to adaptation and health throughout adulthood and old age. Using the adult life span sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, age range 18 to 96 years), we investigated age-differential stability, correlates, and outcomes of accuracy in anticipation of future life satisfaction across ...
The relationship between people's transnational ties and practices and their social position is subject to a controversial debate that suggests a dualistic picture. While there seems to exist a group of highly educated people who benefit from transnational mobility and networks, for migrants the maintenance of transnational ties to their 'old homes' appears to lead to a social mobility trap, and thus ...
The paper discusses the opportunities for an empirically grounded decision support system as an instrument for independent and scientifically based consumer policy consulting. To date, consumer policy is dominated by the information paradigm and the leitbild of the rational, sovereign and information-seeking consumer. Yet, both everyday practice and research in behavioural economics show that this ...
While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In married and cohabiting couples, men have, on average, 33,000 Euro more net worth than women. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, ...
