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...

We discuss and compare five measures of individual well-being, namely income, an objective composite well-being index, a measure of subjective well-being, equivalent income, and a well-being measure based on the von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities of the individuals. After examining the...

In Germany, two observations can be tracked over the past 15 to 20 years: First, income inequality has constantly increased while, second, the average household size has been declining dramatically. The analysis of income distribution relies on equivalence-weighted incomes, which take into...

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory...

We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom...

We analyze the potential influence of a number of factors on the distribution of equivalized net incomes in Germany over the period 2005/2006 to 2010/11. While income inequality considerably increased in the years before 2005/2006, this trendwas stopped after 2005/2006. Among many other factors,...

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...

This paper presents a methodology for comparing income rank volatility profiles over time and across distributions. While most of the existing measures are affected by changes in marginal distributions, this paper proposes a framework that is based on individuals’ relative positions in the...

Using data from three European countries, this paper investigates whether self-reported satisfaction data are subject to panel conditioning or a panel effect, that is, whether answers depend on whether one has previously participated in the panel. The analysis proposes a way to account for panel...

In Deutschland werden die Geburtskohorten der 1956 bis 1965 Geborenen als Babyboomer bezeichnet. Diese Gruppe kennzeichnet sich nicht nur durch eine überdurchschnittliche Kohortenstärke aus, sondern diese waren Profiteure des Ausbaus des Wohlfahrtsstaates und deren Kindheit und Jugend: waren...