Based on the notion that entrepreneurship is a ‘local event,' the literature argues that self-employed workers and entrepreneurs are ‘rooted' in place. This paper tests the ‘residential rootedness'-hypothesis of self-employment by examining for Germany and the UK whether the self-employed...

In a simple 2-period model of relative income under uncertainty, higher comparison income for the younger cohort can signal higher or lower expected lifetime relative income, and hence either increase or decrease well-being. With data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British...

Previous research into the correlates and determinants of non-response in longitudinal surveys has focused exclusively on why it is that respondents at one survey wave choose not to participate at future waves. This is very understandable if non-response is always an absorbing state, but in many...

Chances are high that partners in dual-earner couples do not receive equal occupational returns from long-distance moves, because job opportunities are distributed heterogeneously in space. Which partners are more likely to receive relatively higher returns after moves? Recent research shows the...

We show that personality traits mediate the effect of income on Life Satisfaction. The effect is strong in the case of Neuroticism, which measures the sensitivity to threat and punishment, in both the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socioeconomic Panel. Neuroticism increases the...

Given theoretical premises, gender wage gap adjusted for individual characteristics is likely to vary over age. We extend DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) semi-parametric technique to disentangle year, cohort and age effects in adjusted gender wage gaps. We rely on a long panel of data from...

In this article I analyze the changes in the gender wage gap in the western region, eastern region and in reunified Germany during the period 1999 – 2006. I use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and implement two alternative decomposition methodologies; the Juhn, Murphy and Pierce...

Both health and income inequalities have been shown to be much greater in Britain than in Germany. One of the main reasons seems to be the difference in the relative position of the retired, who, in Britain, are much more concentrated in the lower income groups. Inequality analysis reveals that...

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory...

This paper applies semiparametric regression models using penalized splines to investigate the profile of well-being over the life span. Splines have the advantage that they do not require a priori assumptions about the form of the curve. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS)...