High parental income, while undeniably causing benefits for a child in terms of better access to education and more favorable labor market outcomes, may at the same time increase a child's income aspirations and thereby reduce financial satisfaction, ceteris paribus. In this paper, we...

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...

This paper investigates the relationship between income satisfaction of adult children and their relative economic status, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and income rank as an indicator of status. The results show that children appear to compare their actual economic status with...

Applications of zero-inflated count data models have proliferated in empirical economic research. There is a downside to this development, as zero-inflated Poisson or zero-inflated Negative Binomial Maximum Likelihood estimators are not robust to misspecification. In contrast, simple Poisson...

This study investigates the prevalence and extent of altruism by examining the relationship between parents' and their adult children's subjective well-being in a data set extracted from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In order to segregate the share of parents with altruistic preferences from...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on subjective well-being it is possible...