Weather conditions are an important determinant of agricultural factor input, particularly labor allocation. The availability of weather forecasts can therefore lead to efficiency gains in the form of cost decreases and productivity increases. We test the practical feasibility, the uptake, and...

Throughout adulthood and old age, levels of well-being appear to remain relatively stable. However, evidence is emerging that late in life well-being declines considerably. Using long-term longitudinal data of deceased participants in national samples from Germany, the UK, and the US, we examine...

This study examines the phenomenon of nonresponse in the first wave of a refresher sample (subsample H) of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Our first step is to link additional (commercial) microgeographic data on the immediate neighborhoods of the households visited by...

Social comparisons are an essential source of information about the self. Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency toward comparison with other people's opinions and abilities, raising the question of whether social comparisons are driven by psychological...

Self-reported measures of health are generally treated as weak measures of respondents' objective health status. On the other hand, most surveys use self-reported health to measure health status and to determine the effects of a range of other socio-economic characteristics of the local...

This paper compares the most commonly quoted female-to-male wage ratios (based on hourly earnings in manufacturing) and ratios based on a harmonized analysis of household surveys. The surveys include employees of all types in all sectors - thereby overcoming the problems associated with a lack...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and...

Focusing on individual motorists in car-owning households in Germany, this analysis econometrically investigates the determinants of automobile travel for non-work service activities against the backdrop of two questions: 1) Does gender play a role in determining the probability of car use and...