Despite the commitment that has been expressed by German companies to bringing more women into top management, at the end of 2012, only four percent of all seats on the executive boards and just under 13 percent on the supervisory boards of the top 200 companies in Germany were occupied by women. This corresponds to an increase of one percentage point on the previous year in both cases. Nevertheless, ...
In the German financial sector, the majority of employees are women, but it is still men who hold the top positions. With women making up only 4.2 percent of the boards of the largest banks and savings banks, they were still vastly underrepresented at the end of 2012 (up 1 percentage point from the end of 2011). The story is similar on the boards of the major insurance companies. The situation is somewhat ...
Numerous people in Germany, including politicians and researchers, believe that the gross domestic product (GDP) is an outdated indicator of a society's prosperity. Therefore, at the end of 2010, the German Bundestag, the federal parliament, established a study commission (Enquete-Kommission) tasked with developing an alternative to the GDP for measuring growth, prosperity, and quality of life. This ...
The self-employment rate includes entrepreneurs out of opportunity and entrepreneurs out of necessity. While the effect of opportunity entrepreneurs on economic development should be positive, there should be no or a negative effect of necessity entrepreneurship. We use a geographically weighted regression (GWR) approach to analyze whether the effect of self-employment on economic development is heterogeneous ...
This paper analyses the relation between air quality and subjective well-being in Germany. Life Satisfaction (LS) data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) is connected with daily county pollution in terms of carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3) from 1998 to 2008. The assumed microeconometric happiness function is estimated considering individual time invariant effects. ...
This paper analyses the role of family risk attitudes in intergenerational mobility in incomes and education. Based on 1984-2009 data of sons and fathers from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, there is evidence suggesting that sons with risk taking fathers have a significantly higher educational mobility and persistently higher income mobility than peers with risk averse fathers. They obtain...
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 ...
