Objectives - Taking a cross-national comparative perspective, we investigate linkages between volunteer work, informal helping, and caring among Europeans aged 50 or older: Is the relationship between these activities characterized by complementarity or by substitution? Is there evidence for the existence of (unobserved) personality traits that foster engagement independent of a specific activity? ...
This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which is based on the personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction of entrepreneurial success. A unique data set is used consisting of 414 previously unemployed persons whose personal characteristics were screened by different methods, namely a one-day assessment center (AC) and a standardized ...
Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in a new survey study and examine their relation to financial literacy, while controlling for established socio-demographic ...
We examine how parental health shocks affect children's non-cognitive skills. Based on a German mother-and-child data base, we draw on significant changes in self-reported parental health as an exogenous source of health variation to identify effects on outcomes for children at ages of three and six years. At the age of six, we observe that maternal health shocks in the previous three years have significant ...
In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has dropped in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the "very unhappy" and the "perfectly happy". The extension of public amenities has certainly contributed to this greater happiness homogeneity. This ...
This paper systematically investigates whether different kinds of personality characteristics influence entrepreneurial development. On the basis of a large, representative household panel survey, we examine the extent to which the Big Five traits and further personality characteristics, which are more specifically related to entrepreneurial tasks, influence entry into self-employment and survival ...
This paper compares two prominent empirical measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Schupp, Sunde and Wagner (forthcoming) - with respect to (a) their within-subject stability over time (one year) and (b) their correlation with actual risk-taking behaviour in the lab - here the amount ...