This paper provides an empirical analysis of reference-dependent effects of unemployment on mental well-being. We show that the negative effect of unemployment on mental well-being depends on expectations about the future employment status. Several contributions to the literature have shown that the perception of the individual employment status depends on the surrounding unemployment rate. We argue ...
Information on the number of interviewer contacts allows insights into how people's responses to questions on happiness are connected to the difficulty of reaching potential participants. Using the paradata of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this paper continues such research by revealing a strong link between respondent motivation and reported happiness. Analyses of responses by future ...
This study comprehensively assesses the immediate effects of extreme weather conditions and high concentrations of ambient air pollution on population health. For Germany and the years 1999 to 2008, we link the universe of all 170 million hospital admissions, along with all 8 million deaths, with weather and pollution data reported at the day-county level. Extreme heat significantly increases hospitalizations ...
Bisherige Untersuchungen zur Bedeutung des Besuchs einer Kindertageseinrichtung (Kita) für die kindliche Entwicklung analysieren vorrangig den Einfluss quantitativer Aspekte (beispielsweise des Platzangebots). Wichtig sind aber auch qualitative Aspekte, die aktuell im Zug des Kita-Ausbaus vermehrt diskutiert werden. Die Diskussion beschränkt sich jedoch häufig auf eine Förderung der Fähigkeiten von ...
Like many medical studies, the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE·II) is based on a non·random "convenience sample" of self·recruited participants. To study processes of selectivity in BASE·II, we used an identical questionnaire to compare BASE·II with a large, representative reference study, the German Socio·Economic Panel (SOEP), thereby allowing differences in characteristics of participants in BASE·II ...
We provide new evidence on the impact of one severe weather shock on child height in Mongolia. Our focus is on the extremely harsh winter – locally referred to as dzud – of 2009/10, which caused more than 23 percent of the national livestock to perish. This resulted in a food insecurity situation for many Mongolian households. Our analysis identifies causal effects by exploiting exogenous variation ...