The paper analyzes the effect of mother tongue on labor market outcomes of Swiss residents. This type of analysis can shed light on an important policy question. Is the Swiss labor market well integrated, or can one find instead segmentation along language borders? Improving on previous research...

The apprenticeship system is the most important source of formal post-secondary training in Germany. Using German register data - the IAB Employment Sample - we find that apprentices staying with their training firm after graduation have longer first-job durations but not higher wages than...

Increasing evidence from the empirical economic and psychological literature suggests that positive and negative well-being are more than opposite ends of the same phenomenon. Two separate measures of the dependent variable may be needed when analyzing the determinants of subjective well-being....

The bivariate probit model is frequently used for estimating the effect of an endogenous binary regressor on a binary outcome variable. This paper discusses simple modifications that maintain the probit assumption for the marginal distributions while introducing non-normal dependence among the...

In this paper, we analyze the completed highest education degree of two birth cohorts (1934-1943 and 1964-1973) in Switzerland, using data from the 1999 wave of the Swiss Household Panel. As expected, the fraction of tertiary graduates has increased over time, for women more so than for men....

Much progress has been made in recent years in developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on satisfaction with income and with life in general. In this paper we apply this new type of measurement to the study of money illusion. Using data from the German...

This paper investigates the relationship between income satisfaction of adult children and their relative economic status, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and income rank as an indicator of status. The results show that children appear to compare their actual economic status with...

This study investigates the prevalence and extent of altruism by examining the relationship between parents' and their adult children's subjective well-being in a data set extracted from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In order to segregate the share of parents with altruistic preferences from...

Empirical studies on the relationship between income and happiness commonly use standard ordered response models, the most well-known representatives being the ordered logit and the ordered probit. However, these models restrict the marginal probability effects by design, and therefore limit the...

We examine the effect of single motherhood on children’s secondary school track choice using 12-year-old children drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous studies for the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, we find a negative correlation between single motherhood and...