This note provides evidence for the relationship between income comparisons and subjective well-being (SWB), using novel German data on self-reported comparison intensity and perceived relative income for seven reference groups. We find negative correlations between comparison intensity and SWB...

Low-wage employment has become an important feature of the labor market and a controversial topic for debate in many countries. How to interpret the prominence of lowpaid jobs and whether they are beneficial to workers or society is currently an open question. The answer depends on whether...

The production index is an important indicator for assessing the cyclical state of the economy. Unfortunately, the monthly time series is contaminated by many noisy components like seasonal variations, calendar and vacation effects. Only part of those nuisance components are explicitly...

This paper studies the association between the unemployment experience of fathers and their sons. Based on German survey data that cover the last decades we find significant positive correlations. Using instrumental variables estimation and the Gottschalk (1996) method we investigate to what...

In this paper, an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose German real GDP into the trend, cycle and seasonal components and the working day effect. The most important findings are: 1) The growth rate of potential output declined from 4.2 per cent in the sixties to 1.4 per cent at...