We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on the growth of West German regions. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that empha-size the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

We establish some stylised facts for Germany's business cycle at the level of the firm. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank's balance sheet statistic covering, on average, 55,000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we analyse the reallocation across individual producers and,...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on subjective well-being it is possible...

The previous literature on the determinants of individual well-being has failed to fully account for the interdependencies in well-being at the family level. This paper develops an ordered probit model with multiple random effects that allows to identify the intrafamily correlation in...

Empirical studies on the relationship between income and happiness commonly use standard ordered response models, the most well-known representatives being the ordered logit and the ordered probit. However, these models restrict the marginal probability effects by design, and therefore limit the...

We examine the effect of single motherhood on children's secondary school track choice using a sample of 14 years old children drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous studies for the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, we find a negative correlation between disrupted family...

Much progress has been made in recent years on developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on subjective well-being. In this paper we explore whether this new type of measurement can be fruitfully applied to the study of interdependent utility in general, and...

The macro evidence of increased adjustment pressure since the early seventies suggests that job mobility should have increased. Hence, retrospective and spell data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are combined in order to test the hypothesis that job stability for German workers declined...

The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure. A new econometric model, the Probit-Poisson-log-normal model with correlated errors, describes the data better than existing count data models. Moreover, it has an...