‘Happiness Research’ has attracted a great deal of attention in the social sciences as well as inthe general public. This is reflected by a massive increase in the amount of scholarly work onpeople’s subjective well-being1 and the frequent featuring of happiness research in the media.The...

This paper provides empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis thatthe secular price increase in the 16th century is mainly caused by money supplydevelopments as the discovery of new mines in Latin America. First we reviewprice developments for several European countries over the 16th century...

We test the menu cost model of Ball and Mankiw (1994, 1995), which impliesthat the impact of price dispersion on inflation should differ between inflation anddeflation episodes, using data for Japan and Hong Kong. We use a random crosssectionsample split when calculating the moments of the...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paperexplores whether norms regarding the appropriate pay for women compared to menmay explain these findings. In order to capture the spatial variation in such norms, wetake community level information on citizens’ approval...

We construct a factor model of the yield curve and specify time series processes forthese factors, so that the innovations are mutually orthogonal. At the same time,the factors are constructed in such a way that they assume clear, intuitive interpretations.The resulting “intelligible...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuableskills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match betweenjob characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on subjective well-being it ispossible to...

Arbitrage pricing cannot be applied to commodity futures because the physicalcommodity does not represent a pure asset: Since consumption and processing of thecommodity can drive down inventories to zero, it is not always possible to construct areplicating portfolio for the futures contract, and...

The present paper examines the wage effects of continuous training programs usingindividual-level data from the German Socio Economic Panel (GSOEP). In order to accountfor selectivity in training participation we estimate average treatment effects (ATE and ATT)of general and firm-specific...

This paper examines properties of mean-variance inefficient proxieswith respect to producing a linear relation between expected returnsand betas. The numerical results of a Monte Carlo simulation showthat in the CAPM slightly inefficient, positively weighted proxies causean almost perfect linear...

The question of whether the CEO should also serve as chairman of the board is one of themost hotly debated issues in the recent corporate governance discussion. While agencytheoreticarguments advocate a separation of decision and control functions, the empiricalevidence focusing on U.S....