For policy reforms to increase a society's welfare, reliable information on people's preferences and expectations is crucial. Representative opinion polls, often involving simplifed questions about the complex topics under debate, are an important source of information for both policy-makers and...

Taller workers earn on average higher salaries. Recent research has proposed cognitive abilities and social skills as explanations for the height-wage premium. Another possible mechanism, employer discrimination, has found little support. In this paper, we provide some evidence in favor of the...

Medicare Part D provides prescription drug coverage through Medicare approved plans offered by private insurance companies and HMOs. In this paper, we study the role of current prescription drug use and health risks, related expectations, and subjective factors in the demand for prescription...

Despite its importance for the analysis of life-cycle behavior and, in particular, retirement planning, stock ownership by private households is poorly understood. Among other approaches to investigate this puzzle, recent research has started to elicit private households' expectations of stock...

Retrospective data play an important role in social science research. This paper provides an overview of problems arising during the process and also presents the solutions found in the field. It also shows details of the collection of retrospective data in the Survey of Health, Ageing and...

English Abstract Alarmed by the worsening health for middle-aged baby-boomers in the US, we conduct a cohort analysis of health deficits similar to Abeliansky and Strulik (2019) but focus on middle-aged individuals. As opposed to previous findings, we find that health among the middle-aged has...

English Abstract We use SHARE data from eight European countries to measure the evolution of health of middle-aged individuals over time. In contrast to earlier findings in Europe, we observe a stalling health trend for individuals of later year of birth using an index measuring health deficits....

German Abstract: In diesem Beitrag werden einige der wichtigsten Ergebnisse der Studie „Qualifikationen, Potenziale und Lebensverläufe syrischer Asylbewerber in Bayern“, welche im zweiten Halbjahr 2017 durchgeführt wurde, skizziert. Unsere Studie ergänzt die Literatur zu Asylbewerbern in...

English Abstract: Flexible retirement is supposed to increase labor supply of older workers without touching the third rail of pension politics, the highly unpopular increase of the retirement age. While this may have intuitive appeal, this paper shows that it might be wishful thinking. Economic...