Empirical evidence from several countries reveals that self-rated health is a valid predictor of mortality. So far, there have been no studies conducted for Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) we confirm the relationship between self-rated health and mortality...

This paper investigates the relationship between personality traits and female labor force participation. While research on the role of cognitive skills for individual labor market success has a long tradition in economics, comparatively little is known about the channels through which...

In this paper, we examine how parental health affects children's development of personality traits and problem behavior. Based on a German mother-and-child data base, we draw on observed parental health shocks as a more exogenous source of health variation to identify these effects and control...

We investigate the effect of broad personality traits - the Big Five - on an individual's decision to become self-employed. In particular, we test an overall indicator of the entrepreneurial personality. Since we find that the level of selfemployment varies considerably across professions, we...

This paper is an econometric investigation of the choice of individuals between a number of occupation groupings utilising an extensive array of conditioning variables measuring a variety of aspects of individual heterogeneity. Whilst the model contains the main theory of occupational choice,...

Subjective well-being is a complex phenomenon coevolving with events in important domains of life. Panel vector autoregressions are a suitable tool to analyze the underlying structure of changes in happiness and its coevolution with changes in income, health, worries, marital status and...

People gain utility from occupying a higher ranked position in the income distribution of the reference group. This paper investigates whether these gains depend on an individual's set of non-cognitive skills. Using the 2000-2008 waves of the German Socioeconomic Panel dataset (SOEP), a...