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Are workers with a long commute less productive? An empirical analysis of absenteeism

We hypothesise, and test for, a negative effect of the length of the worker's commute on worker's productivity, by examining whether the commute has a positive effect on worker's absenteeism. We identify this effect using employer-induced changes in commuting distance. Our estimates for Germany indicate that commuting distance induces absenteeism with an elasticity of about 0.07 to 0.09. ...

Reversing the Question: Does Happiness Affect Consumption and Savings Behavior?

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 ...

Weather and Financial Risk-Taking: Is Happiness the Channel?

Weather variables, and sunshine in particular, are found to be strongly correlated with financial variables. I consider self-reported happiness as a channel through which sunshine affects financial variables. I examine the influence of happiness on risk-taking behavior by instrumenting individual happiness with regional sunshine, and I nd that happy people appear to be more risk-averse in financial ...

On Developments in the Mean Joint Lifetimes of Three- and Four-Generation Families in Western and Eastern Germany – A model Calculation

This article tackles the question of how, on the one hand, the high life expectancy and, on the other, the increasing age of mothers at childbirth will impact the joint lifetime of three and four generations and will develop in future. To this end, indicators are derived from the official data on mortality and fertility for the mean joint lifetimes of three- and four-generation families. Because of ...

Reference-Dependent Effects of Unemployment on Mental Well-Being

This paper provides an empirical analysis of reference-dependent effects of unemployment on mental well-being. We show that the negative effect of unemployment on mental well-being depends on expectations about the future employment status. Several contributions to the literature have shown that the perception of the individual employment status depends on the surrounding unemployment rate. We argue ...

Public and Private Health Insurance in Germany: The Ignored Risk Selection Problem

While risk selection within the German public health insurance system has received considerable attention, risk selection between public and private health insurers has largely been ignored. This is surprising since - given the institutional structure - risk selection between systems is likely to be more pronounced. We find clear evidence for risk selection in favor of private insurers. While private ...

Making it right? Social norms, handwriting and human capital

I study the forced right-hand writing of left-handed children (switching) as a case where social norms motivate parents to invest in their children. While the previous literature has found that left-handers obtain less human capital and lower wages than right-handers, due to innate cognitive deficits, I find that switched lefthanders actually perform equally well or even better than right-handers in ...

Social Capital as Good Culture (Alfred Marshall Lecture)

To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively conservative priors. As a result, societies can be trapped in a low-trust equilibrium. In this context, a temporary ...

The Impact of Minimum Wages on Well-Being: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Germany

We analyze well-being effects of minimum wages, using the introduction of the minimum wage in Germany as a quasi-experiment. Based on representative data, a difference-in-differences design compares the development of life, job, and pay satisfaction between employees who are affected by the reform according to their pre-intervention wages and those who have marginally higher wages at outset. We find ...

Assimilation and Cohort Effects for German Immigrants