We analyze the impact of changing employment patterns and pension reforms on the future level of public pensions across birth cohorts in Germany. The analysis is based on a rich dataset that combines household survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and process-produced...

German social security records involve an indicator for part-time or full-time work. In 2011, the reporting procedure was changed suggesting that a fraction of worker recorded to be working full-time before the change were in fact part-time workers. This study develops a correction based on...

How does a negative labor demand shock impact fertility? I analyze this question in the context of the East German fertility decline after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I exploit differential pressure for restructuring across East German industries which led to unexpected, exogenous, and...

This paper seeks to empirically identify factors that influence the probability of being a fast growing firm in Eastern and Western Germany. Descriptive analyses have shown that most firms experience only small positive or negative employment growth or stagnate over time. The job generation...

Do other peoples' incomes reduce the happiness which people in advanced countries experience from any given income? And does this help to explain why in the U.S., Germany and some other advanced countries, happiness has been constant for many decades? The answer to both questions is "Yes". We...

Studying lifetime income inequality for individuals who belong to the same cohort can contribute valuable insights that cannot be obtained by usual analyses of annual incomes. Data from the social security system indicates that in West Germany, over the cohorts born between 1935 and 1972,...

The paper deals with the question which determinants can explain regional differences in the number of start-ups in Austrian and Western German districts when observing the business related service sector. We separate our sample in firms operating in knowledge intensive sectors and start-ups...