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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...