While rising unemployment generally reduces people’s happiness, researchers argue that there is a compensating social-norm effect for the unemployed individual, who might suffer less when it is more common to be unemployed. This empirical study, however, rejects this thesis for German panel...

Using German regional data for 1998, 2002 and 2006, this study reexamines the Oswald hypothesis, the conjecture that high levels of home ownership lead to inferior outcomes in regional labor markets. Including a set of controls for regional unemployment rates, three different econometric models...