We provide a concise introduction to a household-panel data infrastructure that provides the international research community with longitudinal data of private households in Germany since 1984: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We demonstrate the comparative strength of the SOEP data in...

Large and sudden economic and political changes, even if potentially positive, often entail enormous social and health costs. Such transitory costs are generally underestimated or neglected by incumbent governments. The mortality crisis experienced by the former communist countries of...

We establish that the fraction of preference profiles for which the random serial dictatorship allocation is ordinally efficient vanishes for allocation problems with many object types. We consider also a probabilistic setting where in expectation agents have moderately similar preferences...

Attainment of 70 years life expectancy by 2020 is one of the millennium development goals in Nigeria. This study examined the socio-economic determinants of life expectancy in Nigeria using data from 1980 - 2011. Judging from the endogeneity feature of the variables, A VAR and VECM frameworks...

Im Jahr 2009 bezogen 2,3 Millionen Menschen Leistungen der gesetzlichen Pflegeversicherung. Bis 2020 wird diese Zahl um ein Fünftel steigen und sich bis 2050 mehr als verdoppelt haben. Auf einen solchen Anstieg ist die Finanzierung der Pflegeversicherung jedoch nicht angelegt. Spätestens nach...

Dramatic food price spikes in recent years have stimulated debate on the welfare implications of food price risk. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the number of undernourished people in sub-Saharan Africa rose to a record 265 million in 2009. There is a...

Being beautiful gives a person an advantage in many settings. Attractive people earn more and have an easier time getting hired. People spend large amounts of money on goods and services to enhance their beauty. Is this enhancement worth pursuing? Research suggests that the expected improvement...

This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using...

This research aims to find the determinants of participation on social organizations in Chile through a social capital approach, as well as to evaluate the existence of a positive effect between participation and household welfare. In the case of economic and local organizations several...

This paper provides a normative justification for the use of a minimum wage as a redistributive tool in a competitive labor market. We show that a government interested in improving the wellbeing of the deserving poor, while being less concerned with their undeserving counterparts, can use a...