The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms? innovation...

This paper investigates whether firms innovate persistently or discontinuously over time using an innovation panel data set on German manufacturing and service firms for the period 1994?2002. We find that innovation behaviour is permanent at the firm?level to a very large extent. Using a dynamic...

This paper contributes to the literature on subjective well-being (SWB) by taking into account different aspects of life, called domains, such as health, financial situation, job, leisure, housing, and environment. We postulate a two-layer model where individual total SWB depends on the...

Is working more than monetary income? This paper attempts to give an answer to this question on the basis of the German Socio-economic Panel data set. By comparing the satisfaction with life between workers and non-workers with the same household income, the monetary value of participating in...

This paper analyzes the determinants of annual worker reallocation across disaggregated occupations in western Germany for the period 1985-2003. Employing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, the pattern of average occupational mobility is documented. Worker reallocation is found to be...

Die Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Familie ist seit einiger Zeit eines der wichtigsten familienpolitischen Ziele. Zum einen, weil es Eltern, insbesondere Müttern, erleichtert werden soll, erwerbstätig zu sein. Zum anderen, weil die Hoffnung besteht, dass die Geburtenrate steigt, wenn berufliche...

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...

Conventional wisdom suggests that unemployment benefits create a stronger geographic attachment by lowering the willingness of the unemployed to accept job offers. We assess empirically the effect of benefits on geographic labour mobility using individual data from the European Community...

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...

This paper contributes to the debate about the optimal design of tax-transfer systems. Based on the theory of optimal taxation, combined with microsimulation and microeconometric techniques we derive the welfare function which makes the current German tax and transfer system for single women...