This paper argues that public holidays facilitate the co-ordination of leisure time but do not constrain the annual amount of leisure. Public holidays therefore have benefits both in the utility of leisure on holidays and (by enabling people to maintain social contacts more easily) in increasing...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...

Interpersonal relations are shaped by the judgements associated with the social categories that individuals perceive in their social contacts. I develop a model of how those judgments form based on a theory of symbolic values. The model depicts the interaction between two values, one associated...

We test potential social costs of educational inequality by analysing the influence of spatial and social segregation on educational achievements. In particular, based on recent PISA data sets from the UK and Germany, we investigate whether good neighbourhoods with a relatively high stock of...

We empirically investigate possible distortions in subjective performance evaluations. A key hypothesis is that evaluations are more upward biased the closer the social ties between supervisor and appraised employee. We test this hypothesis with a company data set from a call center organization...

Using a unique dataset for Germany that links individual longitudinal data from the GSOEP to regional data from the federal employment agency and data of real estate prices, we evaluate the impact of neighborhood unemployment on individual employment prospects. The panel setup and richness of...

Inequality of opportunity, particularly when overlaid with socioeconomic, ethnic, or cultural differences, may limit the scope of cooperation between individuals. A central question, then, is how to overcome such obstacles to cooperation. We study this question in the context of Germany, by...

We analyze a mechanism that has been disregarded in the literature on parental investment in children, as little attention has been devoted to the choices made by children themselves. We model directly time use by youngsters into activities related to the acquisition of human capital,...

In this paper, we address the question whether family support via the income tax system is more generous in France than in Germany, as it is often claimed in the public debate. We use two micro-data sets and a micro-simulation model to compare effective average tax rates for different household...

Previous studies report a range of estimates for the response of female labor supply and childcare attendance to childcare prices. We shed new light on these questions using a policy reform that raises the price of public daycare. After the reform, children are 8 percentage points less likely to...