We examine differences in altruism and laziness between public sector employees and private sector employees. Our theoretical model predicts that the likelihood of public sector employment increases with a worker·s altruism, and increases or decreases with a workers laziness depending on his altruism. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, we find that public sector employees are significantly ...
This paper investigates the short-term effects of a reduction in the length of high school on students' personality traits using a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment. Starting in 2001, academic-track high school (Gymnasium) was reduced from nine to eight years in most of Germany's federal states, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. This enabled ...
We show that personality traits mediate the effect of income on Life Satisfaction. The effect is strong in the case of Neuroticism, which measures the sensitivity to threat and punishment, in both the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socioeconomic Panel. Neuroticism increases the usually observed concavity of the relationship: Individuals with higher Neuroticism score enjoy income more ...
Negative effects of job loss on adults such as considerable fall in income have long been examined. If job loss has negative consequences for adults, it may spread to their children. But potential effects on children's non-cognitive skills and the related mechanisms have been less examined. This paper uses propensity score matching to analyze maternal involuntary job loss and its potential causal effect ...
We investigate whether non-cognitive skills - in particular Locus of Control - are important determinants of the labour market processes at the low-wage margin. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate dynamic multinomial logit models with random effects and investigate whether Locus of Control influences the probability of being higher-paid or low-paid as well as the probability ...
We examine how parental health shocks affect children's non-cognitive skills. Based on a German mother-and-child data base, we draw on significant changes in self-reported parental health as an exogenous source of health variation to identify effects on outcomes for children at ages of three and six years. At the age of six, we observe that maternal health shocks in the previous three years have significant ...
Nicht-kognitive Fähigkeiten, die sich als relevant für Berufs- und Lebenserfolg erwiesen haben, wurden von der Soziologie lange nicht berücksichtigt. Ihre Wichtigkeit für die Positionierung in der Gesellschaft rückt sie jedoch mittlerweile immer mehr in den Fokus der soziologischen Ungleichheitsforschung und lässt die Frage aufkommen, inwiefern die Genese dieser Merkmale sozialstrukturell beeinflusst ...
In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has dropped in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the "very unhappy" and the "perfectly happy". The extension of public amenities has certainly contributed to this greater happiness homogeneity. This ...