SOEP-Suche

Sharing the Wealth - An Empirical Analysis in Income Shocks and Intra-Family Transfers in Germany

Income Shocks, Intergenerational Transfers, and Human Capital in Germany

This paper uses the GSOEP to analyze the impact of German reunification on financial transfers from parents to their adult children. A difference-in-differences approach is applied to estimate probability and amount of transfers. The analysis indicates that, across time, Easterners are less likely to make transfers than Westerners. Over time, the propensity to give to all children has decreased in ...

The “Bomb” Risk Elicitation Task

This paper presents the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task (BRET), an intuitive procedure aimed at measuring risk attitudes. Subjects decide how many boxes to collect out of 100, one of which contains a bomb. Earnings increase linearly with the number of boxes accumulated but are zero if the bomb is also collected. The BRET requires minimal numeracy skills, avoids truncation of the data, allows the precise ...

A Theoretical and Experimental Appraisal of Five Risk Elicitation Methods

The paper performs an in-depth comparison of four incentivised risk elicitation tasks. We show by means of a simulation exercise that part of the often observed heterogeneity of estimates across tasks is due to task-specific measurement error induced by the mere mechanics of the tasks. We run a replication experiment in a homogeneous subject pool using a between subjects one-shot design. Results shows ...

Safe Options Induce Gender Differences in Risk Attitudes

Gender differences in risk attitudes are frequently observed, although recent literature has shown that they are context dependent rather than ubiquitous. In this paper we try to rationalize the heterogeneity of results investigating experimentally whether the presence of a safe option among the set of alternatives explains why females are more risk averse than males. We manipulate three widely used ...

The Sound of Others: Surprising Evidence of Conformist Behavior

In this article we use the “Click” version of the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task to explore preferences for conformism. In the task subjects can infer the behavior of others from the mass of clicks heard. This signal is uninformative about the precise choices of the other participants, and never mentioned in the instructions. We control the exposure of subjects to clicks by implementing treatments with ...

Representation effects in the centipede game

We explore the effects on strategic behavior of alternative representations of a centipede game that differ in terms of complexity. In a laboratory experiment, we manipulate the way in which payoffs are presented to subjects in two different ways. In both cases, information is made less accessible relative to the standard representation of the game. Results show that these manipulations shift the distribution ...

The Effect of Subsidized Employment on Happiness

While a large body of evidence suggests that unemployment and self-reported happiness are negatively correlated, it is not clear whether this reflects a causal effect of unemployment on happiness and whether subsidized employment can increase the happiness of the unemployed. To close this gap, this paper estimates the causal effect of a type of subsidized employment projects - Germany's Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen ...

A Fixed Effects Ordered Choice Model with Flexible Thresholds with an Application to Life-Satisfaction

In many contexts reported outcomes in a rating scale are modeled through the existence of a latent variable that separates the categories through thresholds. The literature has not been able to separate the e¤ect of a variable on the latent variable from its effect on threshold parameters. We propose a model which incorporates (1) individual fixed effects on the latent variable, (2) individual fixed ...

Encouraging Governments to Enhance the Happiness of Their Nation: Step 1: Understand Subjective Well-Being