Purpose: This paper seeks to analyse to what extent absolute wage levels, relative wages compared with colleagues, and the position in a firm's hierarchy affect workers' absenteeism behaviour. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses personnel data of a large German company from January 1999...

This research note uses two German datasets the large-scale German Socioeconomic Panel and unique data from own student questionnaires to analyse the relationship between risk aversion and the choice for public sector employment. Main results are (1) more risk-averse individuals sort into public...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand how national institutional environments contribute to differences in life satisfaction between entrepreneurs and employees. Design/methodology/approach: Leveraging person–environment fit and institutional theories and using a sample of more...

Summary The degree of employment protection affects employment flows as well as work effort of employees. Whereas the former aspect has been analysed in many studies, the impact of employment protection on work effort has been analysed in few recent studies. Theory predicts that employment...

Abstract The authors update previous findings on the total East-West gap in overall life satisfaction and its trend by using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1992 to 2013. Additionally, the East-West gap and its trend are separately analyzed for men and women as...

Summary We analyze the impact of participation in sports activities during adolescence and as an adult on labour market earnings. Sport might increase productivity due to better physical and social skills. Using the rich information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we estimate...

The aim of the wage subsidy program in Hamburg is to encourage the creation of low wage jobs for unemployed persons with poor labor market opportunities. If a firm hires an unemployed job seeker, both the employer and the employee each receive a monthly wage subsidy of 250 Euros in the first ten...