The 2D:4D digit ratio, the ratio of the length of the 2nd digit to the length of the 4th digit, is often considered a proxy for testosterone exposure in utero. A recent study by Nicolaou et al. (2018) reported an association between the left-hand 2D:4D and self-employment (in a sample of about...

The digit ratio (2D:4D) is considered a proxy for testosterone exposure in utero, and there has been a recent surge of studies testing whether 2D:4D is associated with economic preferences. Although the results are not conclusive, previous studies have reported statistically significant...

There is growing interest in understanding how gender influences the accumulation of wealth. While prior studies focused on labor-related determinants, our research focuses on inheritances and gifts. Using unique survey data that oversamples the top 1% of wealth holders in Germany, we show that...

We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender...

The jackknife is a resampling method that uses subsets of the original database by leaving out one observation at a time from the sample. The paper develops fast algorithms for jackknifing inequality indices with only a few passes through the data. The number of passes is independent of the...

The central limit theorem says that, provided an estimator fulfills certain weak conditions, then, for reasonable sample sizes, the sampling distribution of the estimator converges to normality. We propose a procedure to find out what a "reasonably large sample size" is. The procedure is based...

Well-being (i.e., satisfaction, happiness) is a latent variable, impossible to observe directly. Hence, questionnaires ask people to grade their well-being in different life domains. The most common practice-comparing well-being by means of descriptive analysis or linear regressions-ignores that...

The affordability of housing has become a major topic of discussion in Germany among both social scientists and the public at large. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we provide rent-income ratios over more than two decades and show how they change with households'...

In 2015, Germany introduced a statutory hourly minimum wage that was not only universally binding but also set at a relatively high level. We discuss the short-run effects of this new minimum wage on a wide set of socio-economic outcomes, such as employment and working hours, earnings and wage...

This study quantifies the short-term distributional effects of the new statutory minimum wage in Germany. Using detailed survey data (German Socio-Economic Panel), we assess changes in the distributions of hourly wages, contractual and actual working hours, and monthly earnings. Our descriptive...