The self-employed constitute a large proportion of the workforce in developing countries and the sector is growing. Different accounts exist as to the causes of this development, with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs. Using data from Ghana, we investigate the changing structure of earnings in self-employment relative ...
This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA downgrade announcements negatively affected the value of the Euro currency and also increased its volatility. Downgrading ...
Several interesting SOEP Survey Papers have been published recently. One of the most noteworthy of these is the SOEP Scales Manual, which provides a brief theoretical background of every scale used in the SOEP and a description of its development. The manual also includes the most important references from the literature as well as the wording of all of the items and answer options in the scales ...
It is still not well understood how and why developmental trajectories of self-esteem change, particularly in late life. We investigated the role of resources for self-esteem change across adulthood. In detail, we explored between-person differences in self-esteem levels and change in relation to resources with participants who ranged in age from 17 to 100 years. Study 1 consisted of a cross-sectional ...
We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on people's mental well·being in another industrialized country, more than 5000 miles distant. The meltdown significantlyincreased environmental concerns by 20% among the German population. Subsequent drastic policy action permanently shut down the oldest nuclear reactors, implemented the phase·out of the remaining ones, and proclaimed the transition to ...
We analyze the effect of education on wages using German Socio-Economic Panel data and regional variation in mandatory years of schooling and the supply of schools. This allows us to estimate more than one local average treatment effect and heterogeneous effects for different groups of compliers. Our results are in line with previous studies that do not find an effect of compulsory schooling on wages ...
Abstract: This paper studies the short term and micro level effects of the number of jobs released through early retirement on labour market outcomes for young potential entrants. Causal estimates of old-young substitution effects in local labour markets are obtained by means of instrumental variable estimation, exploiting a unique administrative data set covering the entire population of Norway...
(joint with Charlotte Cabane and Michael Lechner)Previous studies on the effects of leisure activities on skill development do not discuss whether such activities are complements or substitutes. Comparing to which extent various extracurricular activities influence skill development brings us closer to understanding the formation of educational inequalities as well as the mechanisms behind skill...