A recent debate in the medical literature has arisen around the mortality effects of obesity. Whereas it has been argued that the obese die younger, the data that have become available do not immediately support this. This potentially undermines the hypothesis that modern life with its physical...

A recent debate in the medical literature has arisen around the mortality effects of obesity. Whereas it has been argued that the obese die younger, the data that have become available do not immediately support this. This potentially undermines the hypothesis that modern life with its physical...

A recent debate in the medical literature has arisen around the mortality effects of obesity. Whereas it has been argued that the obese die younger, the data that have become available do not immediately support this. This potentially undermines the hypothesis that modern life with its physical...

A recent debate in the medical literature has arisen around the mortality effects of obesity. Whereas it has been argued that the obese die younger, the data that have become available do not immediately support this. This potentially undermines the hypothesis that modern life with its physical...

We quantify the value of changes in life circumstances in Germany following reunification. To this end, we develop and implement a fixed-effect estimator for ordinal life satisfaction in the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find strong negative effects on life satisfaction from being recently...

In this paper we test the Rational Expectations hypothesis using longitudinal data on expectations and realizations of individual welfare for East Germans in the years following reunification. German reunification was unexpected and delivered a large shock to the future prospects of the...

The socio-economic gradient in health remains a controversial topic in economics and other social sciences. In this paper we develop a new duration model that allows for unobserved persistent individual-specific health shocks and provides new evidence on the roles of socioeconomic...

Psychologists and sociologists usually interpret answers to happiness surveys as cardinal and comparableacross respondents (Kahneman et al. 1999). As a result, these social scientists run OLS regressionson happiness and changes in happiness. Economists, on the other hand, usually only assume...

In this paper we address the puzzle of the relation between age and happiness. Whilst the majority of psychologists have concluded there is not much of a relationship at all, the economic literature has unearthed a possible U-shape relationship. In this paper we replicate the U-shape for the...

The socio-economic gradient in health remains a controversial topic in economics and other social sciences. In this paper we develop a new duration model that allows for unobserved persistent individual-specific health shocks and provides new evidence on the roles of socio-economic...