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Weekly Report 19 / 2010
More than half of German adults are overweight. Those most often affected include the elderly, poor, and individuals with poor education. Yet is overweight an issue that economists should address? Poor nutrition and lack of exercise play a major role in widespread diseases. One third of total health care expenditures are devoted to illnesses related to overweight. This is just one of the reasons why ...
2010| Kornelia Hagen
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SOEPpapers 295 / 2010
Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify individuals, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. We use this framework to analyze the role of wealth, health and education, in addition to income, as dimensions of multidimensional ...
2010| Andreas Peichl, Nico Pestel
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Diskussionspapiere 997 / 2010
In this paper, we investigate whether the Google search activity can help in nowcasting the year-on-year growth rates of monthly US private consumption using a real-time data set. The Google-based forecasts are compared to those based on a benchmark AR(1) model and the models including the consumer surveys and financial indicators. According to the Diebold-Mariano test of equal predictive ability, ...
2010| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Maximilian Podstawski, Boriss Siliverstovs
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Diskussionspapiere 992 / 2010
This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on individuals' smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich longitudinal ...
2010| Silke Anger, Michael Kvasnicka, Thomas Siedler
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SOEPpapers 289 / 2010
This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on individuals' smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich longitudinal ...
2010| Silke Anger, Michael Kvasnicka, Thomas Siedler
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FINESS Working Papers 6.1 / 2009
This study questions the popular stereotype that women are more risk averse than men in their financial investment decisions. The analysis is based on micro-level data from large-scale surveys of private households in five European countries. In our analysis of investment decisions, we directly account for individuals' self-perceived willingness to take financial risks. The empirical evidence we provide ...
2009| Oleg Badunenko, Nataliya Barasinska, Dorothea Schäfer
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Externe referierte Aufsätze
This paper documents life cycle (or age) profiles of (log) household income, durable and non-durable consumption for Dutch households after explicitly controlling for time (or business cycle) effects and birth cohort effects. We find that both measures of consumption as well as income is clearly hump shaped over the life cycle. Hence, real consumption per household seems to track income over the life ...
In:
De Economist
157 (2009), 1, S. 107-120
| Rob Alessie, Joppe de Ree
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SOEPpapers 254 / 2009
Using representative and consistent microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) from 1985-2007, we illustrate that capital income (CI = return on financial investments) and imputed rent (IR = return on investments in owner-occupied housing) have become increasingly important sources of economic inequality in Germany over the last two decades. Whereas the operationalization of CI in ...
2009| Joachim R. Frick, Markus M. Grabka
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SOEPpapers 249 / 2009
According to the National Accounts the German savings rate has increased continuously since 2001 after it fell continuously from 1991. This increase was rather unexpected and hence it is interesting to analyse whether the savings rate of the total population has increased or whether the increase in the aggregated savings rate has been due to the fact that the savings behaviour of certain socio-economic ...
2009| Ulrike Stein
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SOEPpapers 173 / 2009
Demographic change is a key consequence of the development of modern societies. The prolongation of life expectancy, shifts of mortality into later life and long-term low fertility rates cause essential changes in population structures - with an increase in the number and proportion of older people as a key feature. The changes in mortality patterns can be seen as a success of modern society. But demographic ...
2009| Laura Romeu Gordo, Andreas Motel-Klingebiel, Susanne Wurm