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New Directions in Life Course Research

Life courses are studied in sociology and neighboring fields as developmental processes, as culturally and normatively constructed life stages and age roles, as biographical meanings, as aging processes, as outcomes of institutional regulation and policies, as demographic accounts, or as mere empirical connectivity across the life course. This review has two aims. One is to report on trends in life ...

Life Satisfaction and Relative Income - Perceptions and Evidence

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broader range of questions than in previous studies. In questions inserted into a 2008 module of the German-Socio Economic Panel Study we ask subjects to report (a) how their income compares ...

Unobserved Heterogeneity and Risk in Wage Variance: Does Schooling Provide Earnings Insurance?

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education to data for the USA, the UK and Germany. We find that in residual wage variation, uncertainty by far dominates unobserved heterogeneity. The relation between uncertainty and level of education is not monotonic and differs among countries.

Child Care Center Quality: Measurement Issues and Links to Child Developmental Outcomes

Take It or Go to Court": The Impact of Sec. 1a of the German Protection Against Dismissal Act on Severance Payments

In 2004, a section was added to the German Protection against Dismissal Act, establishing a new procedure to dismiss an employee, given a predetermined severance payment. Most legal scholars presume the change to be without impact, while a minority of experts claims it to be either beneficial or unfavorable to employees. Our theoretical model suggests that firms will use the new procedure, but that ...

Trade Union Membership and Dismissals

In Germany, there is no trade union membership wage premium, while the membership fee amounts to 1% of the gross wage. Therefore, prima facie, there are strong incentives to freeride on the benefits of trade unionism. We establish empirical evidence for a private gain from trade union membership which has hitherto not been documented: in West Germany, union members are less likely to lose their jobs ...

Risk Aversion and Trade Union Membership

If trade unions provide only their members with insurance against income variations, as a private good, this insurance will provide a stronger incentive for more risk-averse employees to become union members. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and various direct measures of individual risk attitudes, we find robust evidence of a positive relationship between risk aversion and the ...

Direct Evidence on Income Comparisons and Subjective Well-Being

Subjective well-being (SWB) is generally argued to rise with relative income. However, direct evidence is scarce on whether and how intensively individuals undertake income comparisons, to whom they relate, and what they perceive their relative income to be. In this paper, novel data with direct information on income comparison intensity and perceived relative income with respect to predetermined reference ...

Keeping up with the Joneses: Income Comparisons and Labour Supply

We investigate whether working time is related to the intensity of income comparisons and relative income. Our simple theoretical model demonstrates that the effects of relative income concerns depend on whether an individual can choose contractual working hours and/or overtime. In the empirical analysis we rely on novel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which contains direct information ...

Direct evidence for income comparisons and subjective well-being across reference groups

This note provides evidence for the relationship between income comparisons and subjective wellbeing (SWB), using novel German data on self-reported comparison intensity and perceived relative income for seven reference groups. We find negative correlations between comparison intensity and SWB for colleagues, people in the same occupation and friends, but not for other reference groups, such as neighbours. ...