We test whether immigrants are more prone to support terror than natives because of lower opportunity costs, using the international World Values Survey data. We show that, in general, economically, politically and socially non-integrated persons are more likely to accept using violence for...

This paper asks whether trust in political institutions depends on individual’s political leaning and the political ideology of the national government. We employ information on 140'000 individuals in 30 democratic OECD countries from the World Values Survey, 1981 – 2007, and estimate...

This paper empirically analyzes whether government size is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. We thus provide a test of the longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory and public choice theory. According to the neoclassical...

Low fertility rates combined with increases in early retirement pose a serious challenge to the sustainability of social security systems in most industrialized countries. Therefore, it is important for policy makers to understand the determinants of early retirement and especially the role that...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976–2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces the number of transnational terror events in a country, while...

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health of workers using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Methodologically, it addresses two important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectional causality problems and (b)...