In Sen's Capability Approach (CA) well-being can be defined as the freedom of choice to achieve the things in life which one has reason to value most for his or her personal life. Capabilities are in Sen's vocabulary therefore the real freedoms people have or the opportunities available to them....

While inequality of opportunity (IOp) in earnings is well studied, the literature on IOp in individual net wealth is scarce to non-existent. This is problematic because both theoretical and empirical evidence show that the position in the wealth and income distribution can significantly diverge....

Hedonic theory assumes that changes in land prices and wage rates eliminate the utility advantages of differing locations. Using happiness data from the German socio-economic panel this paper empirically tests whether regional utility differences exist and if so whether utility levels show any...

Der Beitrag skizziert zentrale Entwicklungstendenzen des Diskurses um ehrenamtliche Tätigkeit in den letzten etwa 30 Jahren. Dabei werden die Probleme der empirischen Erfassung des Wandels der Ehrenamtlichkeit verdeutlicht. Im Anschluss an die konzeptionelle Diskussion erfolgen Analysen zu...

There is little known about the effects of staggered-hours programs that affect workers' working schedules to mitigate peak congestion. We examine the effect of workers' morning start times on their wages for Germany. In contrast to previous work based on cross-section data, we demonstrate that...

In recent years, the debate about alternative measures of welfare (“beyond GDP”) has con-siderably gained momentum in Germany. This was the case not only on the national level: The demand for such measures has risen on the federal states level, too. For that reason, and in the context of a...

In this paper we propose different criteria to rank income distributions according to equality of opportunity. Different from existing ones, our criteria explicitly recognize the interplay between circumstances and effort. We characterize them axiomatically and we compare them with existing...

Die Debatte um (andere) Indikatoren zur Messung gesellschaftlicher Wohlfahrt und eines "guten Lebens" hat in den vergangenen Jahren deutlich an Fahrt aufgenommen. Und das nicht nur auf Bundesebene. Auch auf der Ebene der Bundesländer wächst die Nachfrage nach solchen Indikatoren. Im Rahmen...

Existing literature on inequality of opportunity (IOp) has failed to address the question as to how the circumstances and choices of spouses in a couple should be treated. By omitting information relevant to the spouse in IOp estimations, the implicit assumption was full responsibility for the...