German Socio-Economic Panel data is used to show that the decrease in life satisfaction caused by an increase in the probability of losing work is higher when self-employed than when paid employed. Further estimations reveal that becoming unemployed reduces self-employed workers’ satisfaction...

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 45,800 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2011 to show first that life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of...

This publication concentrates on the complex interplay between poverty, wealth and life satisfaction. Main areas of life are quantified in a multidimensional approach of poverty and wealth: Individual income, current health, occupational autonomy or employment status and also the mentioned life...

We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on people's mental well·being in another industrialized country, more than 5000 miles distant. The meltdown significantlyincreased environmental concerns by 20% among the German population. Subsequent drastic policy action permanently shut down the...

The thoughts that an individual has about the future contribute substantially to their life satisfaction in a positive or negative direction. This is a result found via five different methods, some of which control for personality and disposition and the potential endogeneity of thoughts and...

The Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) is a multidisciplinary study that allows for the investigation of how a multitude of health status factors as well as many other social and economic outcomes interplay. The sample consists of 1,600 participants aged 60 to 80, and 600 participants aged 20 to...

Sleep is an important part of life, with an individual spending an estimated 32 years of her life asleep. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and that...

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on the role of time. We use panel data on 49,000 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2012 to uncover three empirical relationships. First, life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity...

By using longitudinal data the relation between satisfaction with life and unemployment is analyzed in this study. Data used in this publication were made available by the German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), Berlin. A period from...

While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In married and cohabiting couples,...