In this paper, we analyze the completed highest education degree of two birth cohorts (1934-1943 and 1964-1973) in Switzerland, using data from the 1999 wave of the Swiss Household Panel. As expected, the fraction of tertiary graduates has increased over time, for women more so than for men....

Economics rests upon a set of presumptions about how human beings are affected by income. Yet causal evidence is scant. This paper reports a longitudinal study of randomly selected lottery winners. Remarkably, we show that it takes almost three years before they enjoy their money. We develop a...

We examine the effect of single motherhood on children's secondary school track choice using 12-year-old children drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous studies for the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, we find a negative correlation between single motherhood and children's...

Much progress has been made in recent years in developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on satisfaction with income and with life in general. In this paper we apply this new type of measurement to the study of money illusion. Using data from the German...

We discuss regression models for ordered responses, such as ratings of bonds, schooling attainment, or measures of subjective well-being. Commonly used models in this context are the ordered logit and ordered probit regression models. They are based on an underlying latent model with single...

Recent work by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) establishes an empirical modeling strategy which takes full account of the structural, non-(log-)linear impact of trade barriers on trade in new trade theory models. Structural new trade theory models have never been used to evaluate and quantify...

The bivariate probit model is frequently used for estimating the effect of an endogenous binary regressor on a binary outcome variable. This paper discusses simple modifications that maintain the probit assumption for the marginal distributions while introducing non-normal dependence among the...

It is a widely held opinion that apprenticeship training represents a net investment for training firms, and that therefore firms only train if they have the possibility to recoup these investments after the training period. A recent study using a new firm-level dataset for Switzerland showed,...

The German health care reform of 1997 provides a natural experiment for evaluating the price sensitivity of demand for physicians' services. As a part of the reform, co-payments for prescription drugs were increased step up to 200%. However, certain groups of people were exempted from the...

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...