The paper deals with the effects of social participation activities on life satisfaction. Using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) for 2010, marginal effects of binary probit estimations on life satisfaction are presented. Strong gender differences are observable. While sport, welfare or...

Studies indicating the development of household wealth in Germany are typically based on nominal values and do not take account of price rises and thus the actual purchasing power of those assets. DIW Berlin took inflation into account in a recent evaluation and concluded that the average net...

Studien, die die Entwicklung der Vermögen privater Haushalte in Deutschland darstellen, stützen sich typischerweise auf nominale Werte, lassen also Preissteigerungen und somit die tatsächliche Kaufkraft des Vermögens außen vor. Das DIW Berlin hat in einer aktuellen Auswertung die Inflation...

This paper provides a summary of the findings contained in a forthcoming issue of the Latin American Journal of Economics on entrepreneurship in Latin America as a vehicle for upward social mobility, especially for the middle class. The income persistence coefficients estimated with pseudo-panel...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the causal effects that upgrading slum dwellings has on the living conditions of the extremely poor. In particular, we study the impact of providing better houses in situ to slum dwellers in El Salvador, Mexico and Uruguay. We experimentally evaluate the...

In-service teacher training aims to improve the supply of public education. A randomized experiment was conducted in Mexico to test whether teacher training could increase teacher efficiency in public secondary schools. After seven and a half months of exposure to a trained teacher, students...

This paper studies the impact of access to electricity via solar-powered home systems (SHSs) in rural communities in Peru. Applying propensity score matching at the community as well as at the household level, the authors find that households with SHSs spend less on traditional sources of...

This paper explores the role of religion in mitigating the degree to which unemployment reduces subjective well-being and it examines its support of social programs. The paper goes beyond existing literature in three ways: It extends existing literature to Latin America and Caribbean countries;...

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and...

Electricity from renewable sources avoids disadvantages of conventional power generation but often meets with local resistance due to visual, acoustic, and odor nuisance. We use representative panel data on the subjective well-being of 46,678 individuals in Germany, 1994 - 2012, for identifying...