This paper examines the relative wealth position and the portfolio choices of immigrants in Germany. The empirical findings reveal significant differences in overall wealth and various wealth components between German natives and immigrants. Differences in real estate constitute the major part...

This paper analyzes savings and asset holdings of immigrants in relation to their return plans. We argue that savings and asset accumulation may be affected by return plans of immigrants. Further, the way savings and assets are held in the home- and host country may also be related to future...

We analyze dynamic interactions between market insurance, the stock of insurable assets and liquid wealth accumulation in a model with non-durable and durable consumption. The stock of the durable is exposed to risk against which households can insure. Since the model does not have a closed form...

We explore the implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by unemployment accounts (UA). Under the UA system, employed people would be required to make ongoing contributions to their unemployment accounts, and the balances in these accounts would then be available to...

Dominant development policy approaches recommend women's employment on the grounds that it facilitates their empowerment, which in turn is believed to be instrumental in enhancing women's well-being. However, empirical work on the relationship between women's employment status and their...

Empirical analyses of the effects of public and private pensions on household saving impose strong assumptions in order to obtain a tractable empirical model: fixed retirement and pension claiming ages, no borrowing constraint, little or no uncertainty, and no institutional restrictions on...

This paper investigates to what extent the wealth accumulation of immigrants is explained by their degree of assimilation, defined as the immigrants' capacity to become more similar over time to the local people in terms of their norms, values, behaviours, and socioeconomic characteristics. The...

A review of the basic theory of optimal open-source software contributions points to three keyfactors affecting supply: non-pecuniary benefits, future expected monetary returns, and opensourcelicence type...

We quantify the value of changes in life circumstances in Germany following reunification. To this end, we develop and implement a fixed-effect estimator for ordinal life satisfaction in the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find strong negative effects on life satisfaction from being recently...

This paper presents a methodology to identify net demand shocks as well as wage rigidities in heterogeneous labor markets on the basis of nonparametric regression. We show how this approach can be used to make suggestions for immigration policy in economies with labor market rigidities. In an...