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Income or Leisure? On the Hidden Benefits of (Un-) Employment

We study the usually assumed trade-off between income and leisure in labor supply decisions using comprehensive German panel data. We compare non-employed individuals after plant closures with employed people regarding both income and time use as well as their subjective perceptions of these two factors. We find that the gain of non-working time translates into higher satisfaction with free time, while ...

The magic of the new: How job changes affect job satisfaction

We investigate a crucial event for job satisfaction: changing one's workplace. For representative German panel data, we show that the reason why the previous employment ended is strongly linked to satisfaction with the new job. Workers initiating a change of employer experience extraordinarily high job satisfaction, though in the short term only. To investigate causality, we exploit the event ...

The Protestant Fiscal Ethic: Religious Confession and Euro Skepticism in Germany

During the European sovereign debt crisis, most countries that ran into fiscal trouble had Catholic majorities, whereas countries with Protestant majorities were able to avoid fiscal problems. Survey data show that, within Germany, views on the euro differ between Protestants and Non-Protestants, too. Among Protestants, concerns about the euro have, compared to Non-Protestants, increased during the ...

Smoking Bans, Leisure Time, and Subjective Well-being

During 2007 and 2008 smoking bans were gradually implemented in all of Germany’s sixteen federal states to prohibit smoking in bars, restaurants, and dance clubs. Aimed at reducing smoking and improving health, tobacco control policies are often controversially discussed as they entail potential side effects. We exploit regional variation to identify effects of smoking bans on life satisfaction and ...

Inequality development in Germany in the last decade: A counterfactual decomposition of driving forces (Master thesis)

Equivalence Scales in an Intertemporal Setting with an Application to the Former West Germany

Comprehension and Risk Elicitation in the Field. Evidence from Rural Senegal

In the past decade, it has become increasingly common to use simple laboratory games and decision tasks as a device for measuring both the preferences and understanding of rural populations in the developing world. This is vitally important for policy implementation in a variety of areas. In this paper, we report the results observed using three distinct risk elicitation mechanisms, using samples drawn ...

Intergenerational income mobility revisited: Estimation with an income dynamic model with heterogeneous age profile

The traditional method of estimating intergenerational income elasticity by using the average income over a few years for each generation is subject to attenuation bias due to measurement error and lifecycle bias. In this paper, I estimate the intergenerational elasticity using an income dynamic model with intergenerational linkages. The model can explicitly account for sources of biases such as heterogeneous ...

Dynamics of Individual Income Rank Volatility: Evidence from West Germany and the US

This paper presents a methodology for comparing income rank volatility profiles over time and across distributions. While most of the existing measures are affected by changes in marginal distributions, this paper proposes a framework that is based on individuals’ relative positions in the distribution, and is neutral in relation to structural changes that occur in the economy. Applying this approach ...

Generational Inequalities and Welfare Regimes

This paper uses a new age period cohort model to show that among cohorts born between 1935 and 1975, cohorts born around 1950 are significantly above the income trend in most countries. However, such inequalities between generations are much stronger in conservative, continental European welfare states, compared to social democratic and liberal welfare states. As we show, this is be cause conservative ...