Spatial mobility in the industrialised countries is ever increasing. In West-Germany the total mileage travelled annually by all modes of transportation grew by 40 % over the last two decades (1982 to 2002) to 900 billion kilometres, with the reliance on the use of the car becoming more...

The promise of empirical evidence to inform policy makers about their population?s health, wealth, employment and economic well being has propelled governments to invest in the harmonization of country specific micro data over the last 25 years. We review the major data harmonization projects...

We exploit migration patterns from the UK to Australia, South Africa, and the US to investigate whether a person's decision to smoke is determined by culture. For each country, we use retrospective data to describe individual smoking trajectories over the life-course. For the UK, we use these...

In Germany the foreign born population is made up of foreigners and so called "ethnic Germans" who migrated from eastern European countries to Germany. While the first group is confronted with problems arising from the typical German concept of ethnicity and citizenship, the latter are entitled...

This paper delivers new insights into the development of income inequality and regional stratification in Germany after unification using a new method for detecting social stratification by a decomposition of the GINI index which yields the obligatory between- and withingroup components as well...

Using representative micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the year 2002, we analyse non-take-up behaviour of Social Assistance (SA) in Germany. According to our simulation as much as 67 percent of the eligible population did not claim SA in that year which is slightly...

This paper explores the relationship between two well-established concepts of measuring individual well-being: the concept of happiness, i.e. self-reported level of satisfaction with income and life, and relative deprivation/satisfaction, i.e. the gaps between the individual?s income and the...

This paper explores the determinants of individual well-being as measured by self-reported levels of satisfaction with income. Making full use of the panel data nature of the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide empirical evidence for well-being depending on absolute and on relative levels of...

The European social-welfare model differs from the North American individualistic model in the patterns, more than the overall extent, of ethnic inclusion and exclusion. Focussing on foreigners in Germany and immigrants in Canada as illustrative cases, conventional earnings decomposition...

This paper deals with the question of selectivity of missing data on income questions in large panel surveys due to item-non-response and with imputation as one alternative strategy to cope with this issue. In contrast to cross-section surveys, the imputation of missing values in panel data can...