Similar to other industrialized countries, Germany's population is ageing. Whereas some people enjoy good physical and cognitive health into old age, others suffer from a multitude of age-related disorders and impairments which reduce life expectancy and affect quality of life. To identify and characterize the factors associated with 'healthy' vs. 'unhealthy' ageing, we have launched the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II), a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional project that ascertains a large number of ageing-related variables from a wide range of different functional domains. Phenotypic assessments include factors related to geriatrics and internal medicine, immunology, genetics, psychology, sociology and economics. Baseline recruitment of the BASE-II cohort was recently completed and has led to the sampling of 1600 older adults (age range 60-80 years), as well as 600 younger adults (20-35 years) serving as the basic population for in-depth analyses. BASE-II data are linked to the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), a long-running panel survey representative of the German population, to estimate sample selectivity. A major goal of BASE-II is to facilitate collaboration with other research groups by freely sharing relevant phenotypic and genotypic data with qualified outside investigators.
Summary.We measure trust and trustworthiness in British society with a newly designed experiment using real monetary rewards and a sample of the British population. The study also asks the typical survey question that aims to measure trust, showing that it does not predict 'trust' as measured in the experiment. Overall, about 40% of people were willing to trust a stranger in our experiment, and their trust was rewarded half of the time. Analysis of variation in the trust behaviour in our survey suggests that trusting is more likely if people are older, their financial situation is either 'comfortable' or 'difficult' compared with 'doing alright' or 'just getting by', they are a homeowner or they are divorced, separated or never married compared with those who are married or cohabiting. Trustworthiness also is more likely among subjects who are divorced or separated relative to those who are married or cohabiting, and less likely among subjects who perceive their financial situation as 'just getting by' or 'difficult'. We also analyse the effect of attitudes towards risks on trust.
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may ABSTRACTThe 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 natural experiment that allows us to conduct such a study. Using data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) and from the German SocioEconomic Panel Study (SOEP), we obtain two sets of results. On one side, we find that, shortly after reunification, East Germans displayed a significantly less trusting attitude than West Germans. This suggests a negative effect of communism in East Germany versus democracy in West Germany on social and institutional trust. However, the experience of democracy by East Germans since reunification did not serve to increase levels of social trust significantly. In fact, we cannot reject the hypothesis that East Germans, after more than a decade of democracy, have the same levels of social distrust as shortly after the collapse of communism. In trying to understand the underlying causes, we show that the persistence of social distrust in the East can be explained by negative economic outcomes that many East Germans experienced in the post-reunification period. Our main conclusion is that democracy can foster trust in post-communist societies only when citizens' economic outcomes are right.Keywords: Social Trust, Institutional Trust, Political Regimes. JEL Classifications: P51, Z13. NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARYIn 1990, East and West Germany were reunited after more than four decades of separation. Before reunification, East Germans were governed by a communist regime that systematically violated the basic rights of many citizens. The freedom that people had was further undermined by the German Democratic Republic's State Security Service ("Stasi"). The Stasi kept files on an estimated six million people, and built up a network of civilian informants ("unofficial collaborators"), who monitored politically incorrect behaviour among other citizens. Since reunification, East Germans have experienced life in a market-based democracy, an environment West Germans had experienced since1945. This paper examines whether the levels of social and institutional trust have changed in response to the reunification of Germany. Our main aim is to understand how individuals' trust in other people and in l...
We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the extent of intergenerational economic mobility in a framework that highlights the role played by assortative mating. We find that assortative mating plays an important role. On average about 40-50% of the covariance between parents' and own permanent family income can be attributed to the person to whom one is married. This effect is driven by strong spouse correlations in human capital, which are larger in Germany than Britain. Copyright 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation Royal Economic Society 2006.
This paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact in affecting children's mobility characteristics. Our main result is that the mobility of young adults crucially depends on the presence of a sibling. Siblings compete in location and employment decisions to direct parental care decisions towards their preferred outcome. Only children are not exposed to this kind of competition. This causes an equilibrium in which siblings exhibit higher mobility than only children, and also have better labour market outcomes. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find evidence that confirms these patterns. Copyright (c) The London School of Economics and Political Science 2008.
• ESRC Research Centre on Micro-social Change. Established in 1989 to identify, explain, model and forecast social change in Britain at the individual and household level, the Centre specialises in research using longitudinal data.• ESRC UK Longitudinal Centre. A national resource centre for promoting longitudinal research and for the design, management and support of longitudinal surveys. It was established by the ESRC as independent centre in 1999. It has responsibility for the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS).• European Centre for Analysis in the Social Sciences. ECASS is an interdisciplinary research centre which hosts major research programmes and helps researchers from the EU gain access to longitudinal data and cross-national datasets from all over Europe.The British Household Panel Survey is one of the main instruments for measuring social change in Britain. The BHPS comprises a nationally representative sample of around 9,000 households and over 16,000 individuals who are reinterviewed each year. The questionnaire includes a constant core of items accompanied by a variable component in order to provide for the collection of initial conditions data and to allow for the subsequent inclusion of emerging research and policy concerns.Among the main projects in ISER's research programme are: the labour market and the division of domestic responsibilities; changes in families and households; modelling households' labour force behaviour; wealth, well-being and socio-economic structure; resource distribution in the household; and modelling techniques and survey methodology.BHPS data provide the academic community, policymakers and private sector with a unique national resource and allow for comparative research with similar studies in Europe, the United States and Canada.BHPS data are available from the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex http://www.data-archive.ac.ukFurther information about the BHPS and other longitudinal surveys can be obtained by telephoning +44 (0) 1206 873543. ABSTRACTWe analyse the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a family headed by a single mother. Growing up in a non-intact family in Germany is associated with worse outcomes in models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and educational performance. But once endogeneity is accounted for, whether by using sibling-difference estimators or two types of instrumental variable estimator, the evidence that family structure affects schooling outcomes is much less conclusive. Although almost all the point estimates indicate that non-intactness has an adverse effect on schooling outcomes, confidence intervals are large and span zero.
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The working papers published in the Series constitute work in progress circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comments. Views expressed represent exclusively the authors' own opinions and do not necessarily refl ect those of the editors. Terms of use: Documents in Ruhr Economic Papers #180
This paper examines whether schooling has a causal impact on individuals' political behavior. Between 1949 and 1969, the number of compulsory years of schooling in the Federal Republic of Germany was gradually increased across all federal states. These legislative changes provide an opportunity to investigate the causal impact of schooling on political behavior. Years of schooling are found to be positively correlated with several political outcomes. However, there is little evidence of a causal effect. This study conjectures that there is ample historical evidence to support the hypothesis that the fundamentals of democracy were already learned earlier in school, potentially outweighing the political returns of schooling in Germany. Copyright © The editors of the "Scandinavian Journal of Economics" 2010 .
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