How can we assess the welfare of a society, its evolution over time and predict its change due to particular policy interventions? One way is to use survey-based welfare indicators such as the OECD Better Life Index. It invites people to weight a variety of quality of life indicators according...

Stability and change are essential elements of social reality and economic progress. Cross-sectional surveys are a means of providing information on specific issues at a particular point in time, though without providing any information about the prevailing stability. Limited information on...

We investigate how worries in Germany change across time and age, drawing on both closed-ended questions (which typically list a number of worry items) and open-ended questions answered in text format. We find that relevant world events influence worries. For example, worries about peace peaked...

We investigate how worries in Germany change across time and age, drawing on both closed-ended questions (which typically list a number of worry items) and open-ended questions answered in text format. We find that relevant world events influence worries. For example, worries about peace peaked...

When jobs offered by different employers are not perfect substitutes in the minds of workers, employers gain wage-setting power; the extent of this power can be captured by the elasticity of labor supply that each employer faces. Estimates of this parameter reported by the literature vary...

The paper reports results of a survey among active forecasters of the German business cycle. Relying on 82 respondents from 37 different institutions, we investigate what models and theories forecasters subscribe to and find that they are pronounced conservative in the sense, that they...

A key parameter estimated by lab and field experiments in economics is the individual discount rate---and the results vary widely. We examine the extent to which this variance can be attributed to observable differences in methods, subject pools, and potential publication bias. To address the...

Job security is important for durable consumption and household savings. Using surveys, workers express a probability that they will lose their job in the next 12 months. In order to assess the empirical content of these probabilities, we link survey data to administrative data with labor market...

In this paper, we use the largest exchange rate survey in Colombia to test for the rational expectations hypothesis, the presence of a time-varying risk premium and the accuracy of exchange rate forecasts. Our findings indicate that episodes of exchange rate appreciation preceded expectations of...

The analysis of news in the financial context has gained a prominent interest in the last years. This is because of the possible predictive power of such content especially in terms of associated sentiment/mood. In this paper, we focus on a specific aspect of financial news analysis: how the...