A negative effect of unemployment on subjective well-being has been demonstrated in many studies casting substantial doubt about assumptions of decisions of individuals to choose unemployment voluntarily as the utility-maximising option. These studies have been extended to take into account...

The notion of voluntary unemployment held by orthodox economic theory could be refuted by happiness research, showing that those unemployed experience a persistent loss in life-satisfaction. However, most current research addressing this question is conducted at the individual level or takes...

Prevention has been identified as an effective strategy to lead healthy, active and independent lives in old age. Developing effective prevention programs requires understanding the influence of both individual and health system level factors on utilisation of specific services. This study...

This paper analyses the determinants of different innovation types. Beside a wide range of firm characteristics also the effects of regional factors are estimated using three-level random effect logit models which account for the clustered and longitudinal structure of the data. The analyses...

This paper examines critically the presumption that, other things equal, private schooling offers higher quality education than public schooling. We apply multilevel regression on the 2009 PISA to estimate the differential effect of public and private schooling on student scores in Australia. We...

Increasing importance has been placed on understanding how the environment in which people live can help anti-obesity behaviour and policy. This tendency represents a shift away from a model characterised by individual responsibility in favour of one that focuses on so-called ‘obesogenic...

PISA scores are an internationally established indicator of student and school performance. This paper builds on the evidence that better PISA scores are known to be associated with better later life outcomes. It uses the Australian PISA micro-level data in combination with its longitudinal...

Reading is considered an important skill not only for academic success, but also for active participation in society. International student literacy assessments report gender differences in reading performance in favour of girls. These reports also show that students from schools with a minority...

While undernutrition among children is very pervasive both in Sub- Saharan Africa and South Asia, child mortality is rather low in South Asia. In contrast to that Sub-Saharan African countries suffer by far the worst from high rates of child mortality. This different pattern of child mortality...