The authors update previous findings on the total East-West gap in overall life satisfaction and its trend by using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1992 to 2013. Additionally, the East-West gap and its trend are separately analyzed for men and women as well as for four birth cohorts. The results indicate that reported life satisfaction is on average significantly lower ...
This paper presents detailed evidence about who compares to whom in terms of relative income. We rely on representative survey data on the importance of income comparisons vis-a-vis seven reference groups, allowing us to exploit within-subject heterogeneity. We explore the prevalence and determinants of positional income concerns, investigating the role of personality and economic preferences. Our ...
We demonstrate that interpersonal comparisons lead to "keeping up with the Joneses"-behavior. Using annual household data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the causal effect of changes in reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived to be richer, on household savings and consumption. When controlling for own income, an increase in reference ...
This study aims to explore poverty measures, its dynamics and determinants using Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and consumption poverty. Our results show that the two measures assign similar poverty status to about 52 percent of households and that both approaches confirm poverty is mainly transient in rural Ethiopia. However, we find that the trend in adjusted head count poverty is different ...
The Berlin IO Day is a new one-day workshop sponsored by Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT, WZB, Humboldt University Berlin, and Technical University Berlin which takes place twice a year, in the Fall and in the Spring. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the heart of Berlin, one of Europe's most...
While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In married and cohabiting couples, men have, on average, 33,000 Euro more net worth than women. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, ...
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study examines the relationship between immigrant residential segregation and immigrants' satisfaction with the neighborhood. The estimates show that immigrants living in segregated areas are less satisfied with the neighborhood. This is consistent with the hypothesis that housing discrimination rather than self-selection plays an important role ...
This paper extends the idea of using ex-ante risk measures in a model of precautionary savings by explicitly simulating future net-income risks. The uncertainty measure takes into account the interdependency of labour market status and health. The model is estimated for prime age males using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study for years 2001-2007. The empirical analysis is conducted using a measure ...