By merging administrative data on public finances of all municipalities in Germany with individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we explore whether local public expenditures on sports facilities influences individual labor market outcomes. Our identification strategy follows a...

This article investigates the effects of an increase in paid parental leave - twelve months instead of six months - on children's long-term life satisfaction. The historical setting under study, namely the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), allows us to circumvent problems of selection of...

This paper analyzes the influence of children's health and mothers' physical and mental wellbeing on female labor force participation after childbirth in Germany. Our analysis uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, which enables us to measure children's health based on the...

Despite political efforts, balancing work and family life is still challenging. This paper provides novel evidence on the effect of firm level interventions that seek to reduce the work-life conflict. The focus is on how a specific workplace policy, namely childcare support, affects the...

The paper demonstrates how Sen’s (1985) alternative approach to welfare economics can be used to shed light on the wellbeing of very young children. More specifically, we estimate versions of the three key relations from his framework using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP,...

This study is the first to provide a causal estimate of the subjective well-being effects of spousal unemployment at the couple level. Using German panel data on married and cohabiting partners for 1991-2013 and information on exogenous job termination induced by workplace closure, we show that...

How socio-cultural contexts shape individual functioning is of prime interest for psychological inquiry. Secular increases favoring later-born cohorts in fluid intelligence measures are widely documented for young adults. In the current study, we quantify such trends in old age using data from...

This article examines the impact of unemployment on social participation for Germany using the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find significant negative, robust and, for some activities, lasting effects of unemployment on social participation. Causality is established by focussing on plant...

We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on environmental concerns, well-being, risk aversion, and political preferences in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. In these countries, overall life satisfaction did not significantly decrease, but the disaster significantly increased environmental...

Well-being (i.e., satisfaction, happiness) is a latent variable, impossible to observe directly. Hence, questionnaires ask people to grade their well-being in different life domains. The most common practice-comparing well-being by means of descriptive analysis or linear regressions-ignores that...