How happy are first-generation immigrants in Germany today? How do patterns of formal or informal discrimination affect their subjective life satisfaction? What is the effect of material and immaterial resources? What are the relevant standardsfor the evaluation of happiness? And how does the...

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on the role of time. We use panel data on 49,000 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2012 to uncover three empirical relationships. First, life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity...

Does happiness vary with age? The evidence is inconclusive. Some studies show happiness to increase with age (Diener et al. 1999; Argyle 2001). Others hold that the association is U-shaped with either highest depression rates (Mroczek and Christian, 1998; Blanchflower and Oswald, 2008) or highest...

Rating variables indicate the extent to which a quality is present, or absent, in a unit of observation. In this paper, we discuss a class of non-linear regression models for rating dependent variables and their estimation by parametric and semiparametric methods. An application to life...

The distribution of personal income in a society depends strongly on the within-household distribution of income. Nevertheless, little is known about this phenomenon. I analyze the sharing of income among household partners from a welfare economic perspective. Measures of financial satisfaction...

This paper examines the existence of a habituation effect to unemployment: Do the unemployed suffer less from job loss if unemployment is more widespread, if their own unemployment lasts longer and if unemployment is a recurrent experience? The underlying idea is that unemployment hysteresis may...

The death of a spouse is an extremely stressful life event that consequently causes a large drop in life satisfaction. Reactivity to the loss, however, varies markedly, a phenomenon that is currently not well understood. Because lack of controllability essentially contributes to the stressful...

Posner (1995) proposes the redistribution of health spending from old women to old men to equalize life expectancy. His argument is based on the assumption that the woman's utility is higher if her husband is alive. Using self-reported satisfaction measures from a long-running German panel...

Self-reported measures of health are generally treated as weak measures of respondents' objective health status. On the other hand, most surveys use self-reported health to measure health status and to determine the effects of a range of other socio-economic characteristics of the local...

Theory suggests that subjective well-being is affected by income comparisons and adaptation to income. Empirical tests of the effects often rely on self-constructed measures from survey data. This paper shows that results can be highly sensitive to simple parameter changes. Using large-scale...