This research investigates how family events in adult children's lives influence the timing of their parents' financial transfers. We draw on retrospective data collected by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and use event history models to study the effects of marriage, divorce, and childbirth on receiving large gifts from parents. We find increased chances of receiving gifts of houses or ...
According to the life-cycle theory of consumption and saving, foreseeable retirement events should not reduce consumption. Whereas some consumption expenditures may fall when goods are self-produced (given higher leisure after retirement), this argument applies especially to housing consumption which can hardly be substituted by home production. We test this hypothesis using micro data for Germany ...
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 ...
Findings from consumer surveys and studies about nutritional labeling tend to be hard to compare, because the methodologies they use and questions they address are quite varied. Nevertheless, by evaluating these studies, we can obtain a good overview of existing nutritional labeling systems and consumer preferences. The present background article offers an overview of the studies frequently cited in ...
We use a life cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice to study the effects of social security on the investment decisions of households for the European case. Our model is mainly based on the one developed by Cocco, Gomes, and Maenhout (2005). We extend it by unemployment risk using Markov chains to model the transition between different employment states. In contrast to most models in the ...
We analyze the effect of household indebtedness on different health outcomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1999-2009. To establish a causal effect, we rely on (a) fixed-effects methods, (b) a subsample of constantly employed individuals, and (c) lagged debt variables to rule out problems of reverse causality. We apply different measures of household indebtedness, such as the ...
Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer construct with microfoundations. One complex aspect of micro-level heterogeneity is household size, as individuals ...