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 well as for...

We investigate how a transition from paid employment to self-employment in the labor market influences life satisfaction. Furthermore, we consider the dynamics of work and leisure satisfaction because the balance between work and leisure is an important element of life satisfaction....

Which impact does government size have on life satisfaction, and how do effects of bigger government differ between income groups in society? Previous studies typically employed country averages and thus neglect possibly heterogeneous happiness effects between income groups. The paper addresses...

We test empirically whether people's life satisfaction depends on their relative income position in the neighbourhood, drawing on a unique dataset, the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics. Relative deprivation theory...

We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals, after life and labour market events, tend to return to some baseline level of well-being? Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, we find significant lag and lead...

Economic disruption in East Germany at the time of unification resulted in a noticeable drop in life satisfaction. By the late 1990s East Germany's life satisfaction had recovered to about its 1990 level, and its shortfall relative to West Germany was slightly less than that before unification....

This paper uses concurrently and - for the first time - retrospectively reported life satisfaction from the 1984 to 1987 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to study the importance of different comparison standards for the empirical correlation of unemployment and subjective life...

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the (short-term) welfare consequences of an alcohol ban. Using subjective well-being data to proxy individual welfare, I apply a regression discontinuity design where the date of the implementation of the ban in the German federal state of...

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the (short-term) welfare consequences of an alcohol ban. Using subjective well-being data to proxy individual welfare, I apply a regression discontinuity design where the date of the implementation of the ban in the German federal state of...

While previous research examines how institutions matter for general life satisfaction and how specific institutions embodying equal rights for gay people matter for the life satisfaction of gays, we combine these two issues to analyze how the latter type of institutions relates to general life...