In questions inserted into the 2008 module of the German-Socio Economic Panel we ask subjects to report their income relative to different reference groups, such as fellow employees, other people in their profession, same age and same gender groups, friends, and neighbours. In addition subjects...

Using specific panel data of German welfare benefit recipients, we investigate the non-pecuniary life satisfaction effects of in-work benefits. Our empirical strategy combines difference-in-difference designs with synthetic control groups to analyze transitions of workers between unemployment,...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in...

A recent literature emphasizes the importance of the gender gap in willingness to compete as a partial explanation for gender differences in labor market outcomes. However, whereas experiments investigating willingness to compete typically do so in anonymous environments, real world competitions...

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...

This paper emphasizes the two-way causality between the provision of unemployment insurance and the cultural transmission of work ethic. Values affect the size of the moral-hazard problem and, hence, the policy to be implemented. Conversely, when parents rationally choose how much effort to...

Occupational sex segregation persists in all European and OECD countries; yet in some countries, it is more pronounced than in others. In this paper we seek to explain these cross-national variations by analyzing the realistic occupational aspirations of 15-yearold pupils in 29 EU and OECD...