Recently, building on the highly polarizing Stiglitz report, a growing literature suggests that statistical offices and applied researchers explore other aspects of human welfare apart from material well-being, such as job security, crime, health, environmental factors and subjective...

This paper employs a multidimensional approach for the measurement of well-being at the top of the distribution using German SOEP micro data. Besides income as traditional indicator for material well-being, we include health as a proxy for nonmaterial quality of life as well as self-reported...

Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify individuals, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. We use this...

In 1999, in Germany, the statutory sick pay level was increased from 80 to 100 percent of foregone earnings for sickness episodes of up to six weeks. We show that this reform has led to an increase in average absence days of about 10 percent or one additional day per employee, per year. The...

This study estimates the reform effects of a reduction in statutory sick pay levels on various outcome dimensions. A federal law reduced the legal obligation of German employers to provide 100 percent continued wages for up to six weeks per sickness episode to 80 percent. This measure increased...

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may...