Empirical analyses on the determinants of life satisfaction often include the impact of the number of children variable among controls without fully discriminating between its two (socio-relational and pecuniary) components. In our empirical analysis on the German Socioeconomic Panel we show that, when introducing household income without correction for the number of members, the pecuniary effect prevails ...
Do EU citizens have an increased opportunity to improve their position in the distribution of earnings over time? This question is answered by exploring short and long-term wage mobility for males across 14 EU countries between 1994 and 2001 using ECHP. Mobility is evaluated using rank measures which capture positional movements in the distribution of earnings. All countries recording an increase in ...
We examine the determinants of low income transitions using first-order Markov models that control for initial conditions effects (those found to be poor in the base year may be a nonrandom sample) and for attrition (panel retention may also be non-random). Our econometric model is a form of endogeneous switching regression, and is fitted using simulated maximum likelihood methods. The estimates, derived ...
We propose a framework for comparing the relationship between poverty and personal characteristics across countries (or across years), and use it to compare levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. The higher aggregate poverty rates in the USA and in Britain relative to Germany were mostly accounted for by higher poverty rates conditional on characteristics, ...
Empirical research has unambiguously shown that married men receive higher wages than unmarried, whereas a wage premium for cohabiters is not as evident yet. Our paper exploits the observed difference between the marital and the cohabiting wage premium in Germany and thus provides new insights into their respective sources, typically explained by specialization (husbands being more productive because ...
This paper examines how the economic well-being of households changes after a male household member exits the labor force. We examine, in four countries, labor force exits at various ages and present evidence on household income from various sources before and after the exit occurs. We focus on the rate at which household income is replaced through public and private means after labor force exit. We ...
This paper examines the similarity in the association between earnings of sons and fathers in Germany and the United States. It relaxes the log-linear functional form imposed in most studies of the intergenerational earnings association. Theory implies the relationship between earnings of fathers and sons could be nonlinear, especially at the tails of the distribution of earnings of fathers. When a ...