Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), this paper assesses the relationship between life satisfaction and religious practice. The main new result here is longitudinal. It is shown that individuals who become more religious over time record long term gains in life...

Redistribution across individuals in a one-year-period framework is an empirically intensely studied question. However, a substantial share of annual redistribution might turn out to serve individual insurance in a longer perspective, reducing the level of actual redistribution across...

Social stress can cause physical and mental harm. It is therefore not surprising that public health policy makers have sought to identify and implement policies aimed at tackling this social ill. A frequently prescribed remedy is to reduce social stress by reducing income inequality, which is...

This paper considers the effect of status or relative income on work effort combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with ISSP survey data. We find a consistent negative effect of others' incomes on individual effort in both datasets. The individual's rank in the income...

Policy advice can help political actors design and implement institutional reforms through the generation of political and substantial legitimacy. This article clarifies the institutional pre-conditions of effective supply and transfer of policy advice with particular respect to the field of...

Barely having had the time to digest the economic and social aftershocks of the Great Recession, European welfare states are confronted with the even more disruptive coronavirus pandemic as probably, threatening the life of the more vulnerable, while incurring job losses for many as the...

Measures of subjective well-being have gained substantial attention in economics as quantitative approximations of individual welfare. They allow researchers to study relevant determinants of welfare on an individual as well as on a societal level. These determinants might not to be easily...

The public health measures implemented by governments to limit the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic will produce significant economic consequences that are likely to exacerbate social and economic inequalities. In this paper we provide a framework to analyse how income inequality, besides other...

This paper assesses the existence and the extent of austerity‐oriented policies in Germany in the aftermath of the 2008‐9 recession. In contrast to the intensive phase of labour market and welfare state reforms in the early 2000s aimed at 'welfare readjustment', we do not see austerity...

Empirical research on the determinants of right and left-wing extremist election successes is still dominated by descriptive statistical methods. The existing literature in political economy and political science mainly relies on interviews and survey results as well as on qualitative analyses...