Over the last several decades, there has been a widespread decrease in civic engagement coinciding with a breakdown in traditional family structures in many countries throughout the developed world. According to Putnam in Bowling alone (2000), however, none of the major declines in civic...

In most industrialized countries, more people than ever are having to cope with the burden of caring for elderly parents. This paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact in affecting childrens mobility characteristics. A key insight we...

Using probabilistic expectations data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we establish a link between self-reported expectations of occupational mobility and preferences for redistribution. Our results provide new evidence on the validity of the prospect of upward mobility hypothesis.

This paper empirically examines social network explanations for migration decisions in the context of the German reunification. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio- Economic Panel, we first show that the presence of family and friends in West Germany is an important predictor for the...

Inequality of opportunity, particularly when overlaid with racial, ethnic, or cultural differences, increases the social distance between individuals, which is widely believed to limit the scope of cooperation. A central question, then, is how to bridge such divides. We study the effects of a...

Inequality of opportunity, particularly when overlaid with racial, ethnic, or cultural differences, increases the social distance between individuals, which is widely believed to limit the scope of cooperation. A central question, then, is how to bridge such divides. We study the effects of a...

The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals' attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique...

This paper conducts a cross-national econometric analysis of intra-family location and caregiving patterns. First, we assess, from an international perspective, the relationship between family structure and the geographic proximity between adult children and their parents. We then examine...

An emerging question in demographic economics is whether there is a link between family size and the geographic distance between adult children and elderly parents. Given current population trends, understanding how different configurations of fam- ily size and sibship influence patterns of...