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Population- and Individual-Level Changes in Life Satisfaction Surrounding Major Life Stressors

How do stressful life events impact well-being, and how does their impact differ from person to person? In contrast to work focusing on discrete classes of responding, the current study examines the adequacy of a model where responses to stressors are characterized by a population average and continuous variability around that average. Using decades of yearly data from a large German longitudinal study ...

Old-age Security of Women in the Twelve EC-Countries - To what Extent Are Beveridge's Two Main Principles of Universality and Guaranteed Minimum Income Fulfilled?

Estimating Models of Earnings Dynamics with the European Community Household Panel Data

The aim of this paper is to use panel data on male workers to separate the permanent from the transitory component of earnings inequality for a number of European countries. Several authors have noted the need for long panel data sets when conducting such exercises. Unfortunately the data best suited to international comparisons across European countries (the European Community Household Panel) is ...

Social Ties for Labor Market Access - Lessons from the Migration of East German Inventors

We study the impact of social ties on the migration of inventors from East to West Germany, using the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification as a natural experiment. We identify East German inventors via their patenting track records prior to 1990 and their social security records in the German labor market after reunification. Modeling inventor migration to West German regions after 1990, ...

Does the choice of well-being measure matter empirically? An illustration with German data

This chapter discusses and compares five measures of individual well-being, namely income, an objective composite well-being index, a measure of subjective well-being, equivalent income, and a well-being measure based on the von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities of the individuals. After examining the information requirements of these measures, the chapter illustrates their implementation using data from ...

Health Shocks and Risk Aversion

We empirically assess whether a health shock influences individual risk aversion. We use grip strength data to obtain an objective health shock indicator. In order to account for the non-random nature of our data regression-adjusted matching is employed. Risk preferences are traditionally assumed to be constant. However, we find that a health shock increases individual risk aversion. The finding is ...

Essays in Applied Econometrics and Behavioral Economics (Dissertation)

Socio-Economic Status and Inequalities in Children's IQ and Economic Preferences

This paper explores inequalities in IQ and economic preferences between children from families of high and low socioeconomic status (SES). We document that children from high-SES families are more intelligent, patient, and altruistic as well as less risk seeking. To understand the underlying mechanisms, we propose a framework of how SES, parental investments, as well as maternal IQ and preferences ...

How Does Socio-Economic Status Shape a Child's Personality?

We show that socio-economic status (SES) is a powerful predictor of many facets of a child's personality. The facets of personality we investigate encompass time preferences, risk preferences, and altruism, as well as crystallized and fluid IQ. We measure a family's SES by the mother's and father's average years of education and household income. Our results show that children from ...

Nominal or Real? The Impact of Regional Price Levels on Satisfaction with Life

According to economic theory, real income, i. e., nominal income adjusted for purchasing power, should be the relevant source of life satisfaction. Previous work, however, has studied the impact of inflation-adjusted nominal income and hardly taken into account regional differences in purchasing power. We use novel data to study how regional price levels affect life satisfaction. The data set comprises ...