In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) measurement of inequality. We estimate this parameter using four large cross-sectional surveys of subjective happiness and two panel surveys. Altogether, the data cover over 50 countries ...
This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health of workers using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Methodologically, it addresses two important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectional causality problems and (b) absence of objective measures of physical health that complement self-reported measures of health status. Not ...
In diesem Beitrag werden Möglichkeiten zur Analyse sozialer Unterschiede in der Lebenserwartung auf Basis des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) dargestellt. Einleitend wird ein Überblick über verschiedene Datenquellen zur Analyse sozial differenzieller Sterblichkeit gegeben und der Forschungsstand für Deutschland zusammengefasst. Anschließend wird auf methodische Besonderheiten und Probleme des SOEP ...
Using representative micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this paper delivers new insights into the development of income inequality and regional stratification in Germany after unification. This paper applies a new method for detecting social stratification by a decomposition of the Gini index that yields the obligatory between- and within-group components as well as an 'overlapping' ...
The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the analysis. They also make the ethical priors, implicit in any interpersonal comparison, more explicit. On the ...
The amendment to the German Trade and Crafts Code in 2004 offers a natural experiment to asses the causal effects of this reform on the probabilities of being self-employed and transition into and out of self-employment, using cross-sections (2002-2006) of German microcensus data. This study applies the difference-in-differences technique in logit models for four occupational groups. Easing the educational ...
This paper shows that there are severe measurement errors regarding the occupational affiliations in the German Socio-Economic Panel. These errors are traced back to the survey structure: in years where occupational information is gathered from the entire employed population instead of only from those declaring job or labor market status changes, average occupational mobility is around five times higher. ...
This paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. In a simple principal agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. In this environment unfairness can arise if an agent's reward expectation is not met. Throughout the experiment we record agents' heart rate variability. ...
We empirically demonstrate a practical approach of efficiency evaluation with limited data availability in some regulated industries. We apply PCA-DEA for radial efficiency measurement to U.S. natural gas transmission companies in 2007. PCA-DEA reduces dimensions of the optimization problem while maintaining most of the variation in the original data. Our results suggest that the methodology reduces ...