Over the last several decades, there has been a widespread decrease in civic engagement coinciding with a breakdown in traditional family structures in many countries throughout the developed world. According to Putnam in Bowling alone (2000), however, none of the major declines in civic...

Measuring ego-centered networks is an especially time-expensive endeavor. However, to be included in multi-thematic surveys, parsimony is needed instead of following a maximizing strategy. Therefore, one pressing questions is, whether and which type of parsimonious data collection produces what...

This paper presents evidence on causal influence of happiness on social capital and trust using German Socio-Economic Panel. Exploiting the unexplained cross-sectional variation in individual happiness (residuals) in 1984 to eliminate the endogeneity problem, the paper finds that happier people...

The nexus between social leisure and life satisfaction is riddled with endogeneity problems. In investigating the causal relationship going from the first to the second variable we start from considering that retirement is an event after which the time investable in (the outside job) relational...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people's well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans' well-being...

We propose a regression-adjusted matched difference-in-differences framework to estimate non-pecuniary returns to adult education. This approach combines kernel matching with entropy balancing to account for selection bias and sorting on gains. Using data from the German SOEP, we evaluate the...

This paper relates an individual's social capital and the length of unemployment spells of the very same individual. For this purpose, we analyze several facets of an agent's social activities as determinants of her social capital. Social activities lead to social interactions within...

We study how the diffusion of broadband Internet affects social capital using two data sets from the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that broadband access has long depended on customers position in the voice telecommunication infrastructure that was designed in the 1930s. The actual...

We analyze the long-term impact of the resettlement of the Sudetenland after World War~II on residential migration. This event involved expulsion of ethnic Germans and almost complete depopulation of an area of a country and its rapid resettlement by 2 million Czech inhabitants. Results based on...