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Life Satisfaction, Household Income and Personality Traits

We show that personality traits mediate the effect of income on Life Satisfaction. The effect is strong in the case of Neuroticism, which measures the sensitivity to threat and punishment, in both the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socioeconomic Panel. Neuroticism increases the usually observed concavity of the relationship: Individuals with higher Neuroticism score enjoy income more ...

Life Satisfaction, Income and Personality

We use personality traits to better understand the relationship between income and life satisfaction. Personality traits mediate the effect of income on life satisfaction. The effect of neuroticism, which measures sensitivity to threat and punishment, is strong in both the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socioeconomic Panel. Neuroticism increases the usually observed concavity of the ...

What Matters in the Transition from School to Vocational Training in Germany. Educational Credentials, Cognitive Abilities or Personality?

The German multi-tiered school system functions as an institutional mechanism which prevents students from certain social class backgrounds from fulfilling their individual learning potential. Their cognitive abilities are not transformed into corresponding school performances and credentials. Against this backdrop, we ask whether the transition from school to vocational training may enable young people ...

Income Inequality over the Later-life Course: A Comparative Analysis of Seven OECD Countries

Wage Rigidities in Western Germany? Microeconometric Evidence from the 1990s

This paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been 'rigid' in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology which makes less restrictive identifying assumptions than some previous related work. I find that the relative stability of educational wage premia ...

A Test of the 'Krugman Hypothesis' for the United States, Britain, and Western Germany

Differences in Labour Markets Across the Atlantic

Relative Demand and Supply of Skills and Wage Rigidity in the United States, Britain and Western Germany

I extend a two-skill group model by Katz andMurphy (1992) to estimate relative demand and supply for skills as well as wage rigidity in Germany. Using three data sets for Germany, two for Britain and one for the United States, I simulate the change in relative wage rigidity (wage compression) in all three countries during the early and mid 1990s, this being the period when unemployment increased in ...

Transatlantic Differences in Labour Markets: Changes in Wage and Non-Employment Structures in the 1980s and the 1990s

Rising wage inequality in the United States and Britain and rising continental European unemployment have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the unskilled, combined with flexible wages in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but wage rigidities in continental Europe (‘Krugman hypothesis’). This paper tests this hypothesis ...

Switch-On and Switch-Off Effects of Sick Pay Reform on Absence from Work and on Health-Related Outcomes

We evaluate the switch-on and switch-off effects of a natural experiment that reduced sick pay in Germany from 100 to 80% of the wage rate but that effectively only applied to workers without a collective bargaining agreement. Two years following implementation of the reform, a newly elected federal government repealed it. We estimate the reform’s impact on annual days of absence by applying a difference-in-differences ...