Objectives: Experiencing the onset of a chronic disease is a major life event impacting living conditions and wellbeing. Using longitudinal data, this study investigates immediate and trend impacts of chronic disease onset on life satisfaction and health satisfaction. It further examines, whether healthcare access buffers the immediate wellbeing reduction after disease onset.Methods: Data were...
Organizing long-term care (LTC) is one of the most pressing challenges for the coming years, both societally and politically. Across OECD countries, the proportion of individuals aged 80 and above will increase from an average of nearly five to almost ten percent of the population by 2050 (OECD, 2020). This rapid aging will have sizable implications for the demand and provision of LTC. The issue...
Declining response rates have made traditional, probability-based sampling methods more resource-intensive and thus more expensive. Studies of population subgroups are particularly vulnerable to this trend, as smaller group sizes as well as other factors often make these groups "hard-to-reach" or "hard-to-survey". In response, researchers have increasingly relied on network...
Risk preference impacts how people make key life decisions related to health, wealth, and wellbeing. Yet the evolutionary roots of human risk taking behavior remain poorly understood. I will present two studies on risk preferences in chimpanzees, one of our closest living relatives.In the first study, we investigated whether chimpanzees (N=13) differentiate between social...
This study deals with the impact of the 2015 European Refugee Crisis on the ethnic identity of resident migrants in Germany. To derive plausibly causal estimates, I exploit the quasi-experimental setting in Germany, by which refugees are allocated to different counties by state authorities without being able to choose their locations themselves. This study finds that higher...
The assumption that economic resources are equally shared within households has been found to be untenable for income but is still often upheld for wealth. In this introduction to the special issue “Wealth in Couples”, we argue that within-household inequality in wealth is a pertinent and under-researched area that is ripe for development. To this end, we outline the relevance of wealth for demographic ...
We carry out a difference-in-differences analysis of a representative real-time survey conducted as part of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study and show that teleworking had a negative average effect on life satisfaction over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This average effect hides considerable heterogeneity reflecting genderrole asymmetry: lower life satisfaction is only found ...
This study examines the money-subjective well-being nexus by studying the link between changes in jointly and solely (i.e. respondents’ own and their partner’s own) held gross wealth and changes in married individuals’ subjective well-being. Joint assets reflect norms of sharing responsibilities and resources. Solely held assets, in contrast, offer individual economic independence. Using wealth data ...
We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender loneliness gap: women were lonelier than men in 2017, and the 2017-2020 rise in loneliness was far larger for ...
