We present empirical evidence suggesting that technological progress in the digital age will be biased not only with respect to skills acquired through education but additionally with respect to non-cognitive skills (personality). We measure the direction of technological change by estimated future digitalization probabilities of occupations, and non-cognitive skills by the Big Five personality traits ...
The Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) is a multidisciplinary study that allows for the investigation of how a multitude of health status factors as well as many other social and economic outcomes interplay. The sample consists of 1,600 participants aged 60 to 80, and 600 participants aged 20 to 35. The socio-economic part of BASE-II, the so called SOEPBASE, is conducted by the SOEP Group at the DIW Berlin. ...
Existing research shows that women’s employment patterns are not so much driven by gender, as by gendered parenthood, with childless women and men (including fathers) employed at substantially higher levels than mothers in most countries. We focus on the cross-national variation in the gap in employment participation and working time between mothers and women without children in the same household. ...
This paper investigates the likelihood and timing of housing tenure choice dynamics including both the initial transition to homeownership, and possible transitions back to rental tenure and to an additional owned home. This is done across the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Further, housing price data is added for both countries. For the US, data ...
This study explores the causal direction between happiness and charitable giving. Through the application of Cohen’s path analysis, the main purpose of the study is to find evidence which of the possible causal directions—the one from giving to happiness or from happiness to giving—is the more dominant one. To that aim the authors use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 2009/10. In a sample of ...
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (N = 13,145), we investigate the effects of (not) achieving aspirations on subjective well-being. We match individual-level data about life satisfaction aspirations with their subsequent realizations and we jointly estimate two panel-data equations, the first depicting the effects that (not) achieving initial aspirations exerts on the subsequent level ...
Aims Social scientists have postulated that the discrepancy between achievements and expectations affects individuals' subjective well-being. Still, little has been done to qualify and quantify such a psychological effect. Our empirical analysis assesses the consequences of positive and negative affective forecasting errors—the difference between realized and expected subjective well-being—on the subsequent ...
Similar to other industrialized countries, Germany’s population is ageing. Whereas some people enjoy good physical and cognitive health into old age, others suffer from a multitude of age-related disorders and impairments which reduce life expectancy and affect quality of life. To identify and characterize the factors associated with ‘healthy’ vs. ‘unhealthy’ ageing, we have launched the Berlin Aging ...
The paper inquires into the impact of personality-factors on the selection and self-selection of recruits for parliamentary mandates by comparing the personality profile of German MPs with a matching sample of the general population (matching in terms of education, gender, age and party preferences). It further determines whether MPs personality has an impact on their policy preferences (expansionist ...