The extraordinary COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most severe disruptions of human life since the end of World War II, even in rich and industrialized countries like Germany. The introduction of a rather comprehensive “lockdown” and the restriction of multiple basic civil rights have affected the population in many areas of life, like employment, economic prosperity, health and trust in public institutions. The question arises how life satisfaction is influenced by these measures in detail and whether there are interactions between institutional trust, life satisfaction and time of crisis. Fixed-effect regression analyses using German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) data demonstrate that life satisfaction has fallen sharply after the onset of the crisis and that interaction effects with institutional trust are present. Individuals with low levels of pre-crisis trust in institutions like the government, courts or the media report a stronger decrease of satisfaction than individuals with higher levels of trust. We believe that these results are relevant to explain the role of institutions in times of crisis and might serve as foundations for interventions to strengthen trust and increase overall satisfaction.

Classifying and explaining the causal and functional relationship between age and life satisfaction, especially in an international context, is still a major open question in demographics and happiness-research. Especially the debate whether to include sociodemographic control variables in these models has received much attention and deserves more discussion. The current contribution takes a cross-country perspective and attempts to sort countries into larger clusters, depending on their specific functional form. Using cross-sectional data from 81 countries with more than 170,000 respondents, the analyses demonstrate that there exist three larger clusters which display distinct functional relations (linear decline, U-shape, decline with a stable old-age period). Sociodemographic controls are not introduced since the total causal effect is to be estimated. Furthermore, the contribution explains cluster membership exploratively using macro indicators. While it becomes clear that countries with a linear decline are usually less developed countries, differences between the other two clusters are much less obvious.

Educational aspirations can be regarded as a predictor of final educational attainment, rendering this construct highly relevant for analysing the development of educational inequalities in panel data settings. In the context of the German tracked secondary school system, we analysed school-track effects on the development of educational aspirations. Using data from five consecutive waves of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we selected a sample of high-performing students with initially high aspirations. Our results indicate that pupils in the nonacademic track or with a low social origin tend to lower their aspirations significantly more often than pupils in the academic track or pupils with a high social origin. With mediation analyses, we demonstrate that these differences can be attributed to learning environments at the school level. We also show that the downward adjustment of aspirations in the nonacademic track is less pronounced for students from highly educated families than for students from low-education family backgrounds.

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