We analyse the effects of playing music, or doing sports on education and health outcomes of adolescents. After identifying adolescents who play music, do sports, or both, in the German Socio-Economic Panel, we use matching procedures to estimate causal effects. We find that playing music instead of doing sports fosters educational outcomes by about 0.1 standard deviations. Effects are stronger for ...
We survey the literature on the link of labour market related outcomes to individual physical activity and sports participation. The first part of the survey is devoted to the individual participation decision and is based on papers from various disciplines. The second part summarises parts of the epidemiological literature on health effects and the economic literature on the labour market effects ...
This report describes surveys in 15 EU Member States that meet two conditions: they are national, covering all or most of the working population; and they relate at least primarily to working conditions issues, such as health and safety at the workplace, work organisation, quality of working life and work–life balance. For each survey, a data sheet provides the main characteristics of the survey in ...
In the face of rising old-age dependency ratios in industrialized countries like Germany, politicians and their electorates discuss the loosening of immigration policies as one policy option to ensure the sustainability of public social security systems. The question arises whether this policy option is feasible in aging countries: older individuals are typically found to be more averse to immigration. ...
In view of the demographic trends, most EU countries face the problem of a declining work force in the future. Understanding the interaction between income support systems (such as unemployment benefits, social assistance, early retirement and pension systems) and total labor supply is of crucial importance to combat problems and ensure economic growth in the future. The German labor market has been ...
Internal migration can substantially improve labor market efficiency. Consequently, policy is often targeted towards reducing the barriers workers face in moving to new labor markets. In this paper we explicitly model internal migration as the result of a job search process and demonstrate that assumptions about the timing of job search have fundamental implications for the pattern of internal migration ...
We extend standard models of work-related training by explicitly incorporating workers’ locus of control into the investment decision through the returns they expect. Our model predicts that higher internal control results in increased take-up of general, but not specific, training. This prediction is empirically validated using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP). We provide empirical ...
Standard job search theory assumes that unemployed individuals have perfect information about the effect of their search effort on the job offer arrival rate. In this paper, we present an alternative model which assumes instead that each individual has a subjective belief about the impact of his or her search effort on the rate at which job offers arrive. These beliefs depend in part on an individual's ...