Using a unique dataset of German members of parliament with information on total earnings including outside income, this paper analyzes the politicians' wage gap (PWG). After controlling for observable characteristics as well as accounting for selection into politics, we find a positive PWG...

The article analyzes the question of whether career politicians differ systematically from the general population in terms of their attitudes toward risk. A written survey of members of the 17th German Bundestag in late 2011 identified their risk attitudes, and the survey data was set in...

As from a political economy perspective, politicians often fail to implement structural reforms, we investigate if the resistance to reform is based on the differences in the risk preferences of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. Based on the empirical results of a survey of the population in...

Despite the prevalence of government surveillance systems around the world, causal evidence on their social and economic consequences is lacking. Using county-level variation in the number of Stasi informers within Socialist East Germany during the 1980s and accounting for potential endogeneity,...

This paper focuses on fraud detection in surveys using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data as an example for testing newly methods proposed here. A statistical theorem referred to as Benford's Law states that in many sets of numerical data, the significant digits are not uniformly distributed, as...

This paper asks whether part-time work makes women happy. Previous research on labour supply has assumed that as workers freely choose their optimal working hours on the basis of their innate preferences and the hourly wage rate, outcome reflects preference. This paper tests this assumption by...

The main aim of the present paper is to historically reappraise the development of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) in the 1990s after the first six waves had been collected. This development was closely connected to the opening of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the fall of...

The connections between the polarization of living conditions, social conflicts concerning the distribution of resources and the perception of social inequality in Germany will be picked out as a central theme. By means of empirical findings it becomes clear that the degree of inequality and...

The discussion paper picks out the objective and the subjective well-being of the unemployed in Germany compared to the total population as a central theme. The results indicate a distinctly worse material, i. e. objective circumstance of the unemployed. This is reflected by the subjective...

The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the impor-tance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may...