We measure the impact of individuals' looks on their life satisfaction or happiness. Using five data sets from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, we construct beauty measures in different ways that allow putting a lower bound on the true effects of beauty on happiness. Personal beauty...

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education. We replicate the original study on US men and extend to US women, UK men and German men. Most original results are not robust. A college education cannot universally be considered an...

The evaluation of labor market policies has become an important issue in many European countries. In recent years, many of them have opened their administrative databases for evaluation studies. The advantages of administrative data are straightforward: they are accurate, contain a large number...

It is well known that individuals' risk attitudes are related to behavioral outcomes such as smoking, portfolio decisions, and also educational attainment, but there is barely any evidence on whether parental risk attitudes affect the educational attainment of dependent children. We add to this...

This study reports results from an empirical investigation of business services sector firms that (start to) export, comparing exporters to firms that serve the national market only. We estimate identically specified empirical models using comparable enterprise level data from France, Germany,...

This study used data from the German Socio-economic Panel to examine gender differences in the extent to which self-reported subjective well-being was associated with occupying a high-level managerial position in the labour market, compared with employment in non-leadership, non-high-level...

A lack of cultural integration is often blamed for hindering immigrant families' economic progression. This paper is a first attempt to explore whether immigrant parents' ethnic identity affects the next generation's human capital accumulation in the host country. Empirical results based on data...

During World War II, more than one-half million tons of bombs were dropped in aerial raids on German cities, destroying about forty percent of the total housing stock nationwide. With a large fraction of the male population gone, the reconstruction process had mainly fallen on women in postwar...

This study investigates how the first childbirth affects the wage processes of highly attached women. We estimate a flexible fixed effects wage regression model extended with post-birth fixed effects by the control function approach. Register data on West Germany are used and we exploit the...

Based on the notion that entrepreneurship is a 'local event,' the literature argues that self-employed workers and entrepreneurs are 'rooted' in place. This paper tests the 'residential rootedness'-hypothesis of self-employment by examining for Germany and the UK whether the self-employed are...