In Romania, the communist regime promoted an official policy of gender equality for morethan 40 years, providing equal access to education and employment, and restricting paydifferentiation based on gender. After its fall in December 1989, the promotion of equalopportunities and treatment for...

This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect onsubjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types ofbenchmarks...

It is puzzling that people feel quite unhappy when they become unemployed, while at thesame time active labor market policies are needed to bring unemployed back to work morequickly. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we investigate whether there isindeed such a puzzle. First, we...

While results are starting to emerge, not much is known yet about the dynamics of the labormarkets of the former Eastern economies, especially in the context of the current FinancialCrisis. Arguably, this is mainly due to paucity of (panel) data. By examining labor markettransitions, earnings...

In view of rising wage inequality and increasing poverty, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of the introduction of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.5 per hour on the basis of a...

High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular job security, in workers´ well-being by exploiting sector-specific institutional differences...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional lossesare from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death ofa child; the third-worst is the death of a parent...

Using fixed effects ordered logit estimation, we investigate the relationship between part-timework and working hours satisfaction; job satisfaction; and life satisfaction. We account forinterdependence within the family using data on partnered men and women from the BritishHousehold Panel Survey...

Standard search models are unreliable for structural inference of the underlying sources ofwage inequality because they are inconsistent with observed residual wage dispersion. Weaddress this issue by modeling skill development and duration dependence in unemploymentbenefits in a random on the...

Empirical investigations with enterprise level data from official statistics often use the averagewage as a proxy variable for the qualification of the workforce, mostly due to the lack ofdetailed information on the qualification of the employees. This paper uses unique newlyavailable data for...