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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
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SOEPpapers 186 / 2009
Homeownership rates are very different across European countries. They range from below 50% in Germany to over 80% in Greece, Spain or Ireland. However the differences lie not only in the overall homeownership rates but also in its structure, and this is the focus of this paper. Its aim is to study the impact of microeconomic factors on household's tenure choice, using a cross-country comparative approach. ...
2009| Monika Bazyl
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SOEPpapers 202 / 2009
Adequate housing and affordable warmth are essential human needs, the lack of which may seriously harm people's health. Germany provides an allowance to low-income households, covering the housing as well as the space heating cost, to protect people from the consequences of poor housing conditions and fuel poverty. In order to limit public expenditures, payment recipients are required to choose low-cost ...
2009| Peter Grösche
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SOEPpapers 219 / 2009
I examine the impact of happiness on consumption and savings behavior using data from the DNB Household Survey from the Netherlands and the German Socio-Economic Panel. Instrumenting individual happiness with regional sunshine, the results suggest that happier people save more, spend less, and have a lower marginal propensity to consume. Happier people take more time for making decisions and have more ...
2009| Cahit Guven
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SOEPpapers 224 / 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-perceivedwillingness to take financial risks. The empirical evidence we provide ...
2009| Oleg Badunenko, Nataliya Barasinska, Dorothea Schäfer
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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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Refereed essays Web of Science
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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FINESS Working Papers 4.2 / 2009
Perfect consumption risk sharing requires both, frictionless goods as well as frictionless financial market integration. This project aims at analyzing the consequences of both type of frictions for the allocation of risk across countries in a unified framework. To this end, the theoretical model by Ghironi and Melitz (2005) is extended to allow for international trade in equities. This setup incorporates ...
2009| Sven Blank
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DIW Discussion Papers 946 / 2009
The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general public. These data can be used to improve the short-term forecasts or nowcasts of various macroeconomic variables. ...
2009| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Maximilian Podstawski, Boriss Siliverstovs, Constantin Bürgi
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SOEPpapers 234 / 2009
The research on private financial transfers between generations lacks a longitudinal perspective. Gifts as intergenerational transfers inter vivos allow us to study the importance of life course events for the chances of receiving transfers. In Germany, gifts are highly private and leave more scope for decision-making than the regulated bequests. Thus, gifts are better suited to test theories on family ...
2009| Thomas Leopold, Thorsten Schneider