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Although individuals vary in how optimistic they are about the future, one assumption that researchers make is that optimism is sensitive to changes in life events and circumstances. We examined how optimism and pessimism changed across the lifespan and in response to life events in three large panel studies (combined N = 74,886). In the American and Dutch samples, we found that optimism increased ...
In:
Journal of Research in Personality
88 (2020), October 2020, 103985
| William J. Chopik, Jeewon Oh, Eric S. Kim, Ted Schwaba, Michael D. Krämer, David Richter, Jacqui Smith
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High-wealth individuals are typically underrepresented or completely missing in population surveys. The lack of comprehensive national registers on high-wealth individuals in many countries challenged previous attempts to remedy this under-representation. In a novel research design, we draw on public data on the shareholding structures of companies as a sampling frame. Our design builds on the empirical ...
In:
Review of Income and Wealth
66 (2020), 4, 825-849
| Carsten Schröder, Charlotte Bartels, Markus M. Grabka, Johannes König, Martin Kroh, Rainer Siegers
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This paper provides one of the first tests of adaptation to the complete set of residential transitions. We use long-run SOEP panel data and consider the impact of all housing transitions, whether or not they involve a change in housing tenure or geographical movement, on both life satisfaction and housing satisfaction. Controlling for individual characteristics, some residential transitions affect ...
In:
Review of Economics of the Household
21 (2023), 2, 645-672
| Andrew E. Clark, Luis Diaz-Serrano
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German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics ...
In:
Journal of Economic Perspectives
34 (2020), 2, 143-171
| Sascha O. Becker, Lukas Mergele, Ludger Woessmann
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Using a new German individual data set, we investigate the influence on health with respect to personal traits measured by the Big Five, collegiality, commitment and job characteristics. Among the Big Five conscientiousness, agreeableness and emotional stability correlate positively with good health. Job characteristics like activities combined with substantial decision authority, no physically demanding ...
Bonn:
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA),
2019,
(IZA DP No. 12597)
| Lutz Bellmann, Olaf Hübler
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This is the first paper to examine experimentally effects of information provision on beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns of postgraduate education, enrolment intentions and realized enrolment. We find that our treatment causally affects beliefs measured six months after treatment. The effects on beliefs differ by gender and academic background, and we find that stated enrolment intentions ...
In:
Economica
89 (2022), 355, 627-646
| Jan Berkes, Frauke Peter, C. Katharina Spieß, Felix Weinhardt
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We decompose the satisfaction gap between East and West Germany into objective circumstances and subjective mentality, the latter capturing the way circumstances are being evaluated. Using the methodology proposed by Senik (2014) we find circumstances and mentality to contribute in the proportion 55: 45%. The mentality-related gap is driven by birth cohorts socialized under different political regimes ...
In:
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
181 (2021), January 2021, 1-18
| Philipp Biermann, Heinz Welsch
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The volume presents an updated overview of the background ideas of the NEPS and its conceptional framework. It informs about the longitudinal structure of the multicohort sequence design and discusses its key methodological challenges as well as data protection issues. It also describes the organizational structure of the consortium of leading educational scientists and research institutions who have ...
Wiesbaden:
Springer VS,
2019,
| Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Hans-Günther (eds.) Roßbach
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Most of the existing empirical literature on self-employment decisions assumes that individuals’ risk-taking propensities are stable over time. We allow for endogeneity on both sides when examining the relationship between individual risk-taking propensities and entry into self-employment. We confirm that a greater risk-taking propensity is associated with a higher probability of entering self-employment. ...
In:
Small Business Economics
55 (2020), 4, 1057-1074
| Matthias Brachert, Walter Hyll, Abdolkarim Sadrieh
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This study uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to analyze peer effects in risk preferences. Empirical evidence on the impact of peer groups on individual willingness to take risks (‘peer effects’) is very limited so far as causality is hard to establish. To establish a causal relationship between individual and community risk preferences, we use an instrumental variables approach where we ...
In:
Annals of Operations Research
299 (2021), 1-2, 1129-1163
| Mark J. Browne, Annette Hofmann, Andreas Richter, Sophie-Madeleine Roth, Petra Steinorth