Research Projects

This research project investigates the effects of unemployment on the subjective well-being of affected individuals and of people in their social environment. For this purpose, data from social surveys such as the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and comparable surveys from other countries, as well as time-use and well-being studies (such as the American Time Use Survey), are analyzed.
Previous work in this project has examined, for example, how participants in public employment programs feel compared to unemployed and regularly employed individuals; how entering retirement affects satisfaction and whether it matters if one was employed or unemployed just before retirement; and for which groups in the labor market employment protection legislation and restrictions on fixed-term contracts have positive or negative effects on well-being.
A particular focus of this research project is on the multidimensionality of well-being. In addition to cognitive measures, affective well-being indicators are also analyzed. Previous findings show that unemployment has a negative impact on cognitive well-being but not on affective well-being.
Further research will focus on analyzing in more detail the determinants of affective well-being and their interaction with experiences of unemployment.

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This project investigates why unemployed individuals report lower emotional well-being than employed individuals—even during leisure time. Previous research (e.g., Knabe, Schöb, Rätzel, and Weimann, Economic Journal, 2010) showed that unemployment reduces life satisfaction not only through income loss or lack of work-related purpose, but also because leisure itself becomes less enjoyable—a phenomenon known as the “saddening effect” of unemployment.
The project aims to unpack and quantify the channels through which this saddening effect arises. Using time-use and well-being diary data from the UK Time Use Survey (UKTUS 2014–2015), American Time Use Survey (ATUS 2010–2013, 2021), and German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP 2012–2015), we analyze how unemployed and employed individuals experience emotional well-being across different daily activities.
The empirical strategy combines mediation analysis and Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions.
Preliminary results from the UKTUS data confirm a significant saddening effect of unemployment, particularly for men and during core leisure activities. However, differences in income, activity duration, or education explain little of this gap. The most consistent factor is that unemployed individuals spend more of their leisure time alone, which strongly reduces the emotional payoff from non-work activities.
By integrating evidence from multiple countries and datasets, the project seeks to clarify the mechanisms behind the emotional costs of unemployment and to identify potential policy levers for mitigating its psychological burden.

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In this project, we examine whether and to what extent patterns of charitable donations still differ between the two parts of Germany more than 30 years after reunification. Despite significant convergence in living standards and many social attitudes, earlier studies have shown persistent differences in social behavior and solidarity-related values. This project asks whether such differences are also reflected in real-world acts of generosity.
Using anonymized individual data from the German income tax statistics (FAST) for the years 1998–2020, the project analyzes the incidence and amount of charitable donations and compares them between East and West Germany. These administrative data offer a large and detailed sample, allowing robust analysis over time.
Preliminary results suggest that people in East Germany donate less frequently and in smaller amounts than those in West Germany. While income differences initially explained much of this gap, the analysis indicates that over time, the unexplained (likely cultural or attitudinal) component has grown. Overall, the project will produce insights whether solidarity-related behaviors such as charitable giving still display a persistent East–West divide, which would suggest that historical, cultural, and institutional legacies of the socialist period continue to shape social behavior in reunified Germany.

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The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), developed by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, is a diary-based approach designed to measure people’s emotional well-being throughout the day. Participants divide the previous day into distinct episodes and report how they felt during each one. Researchers then calculate an individual’s overall well-being—what Kahneman has termed “objective happiness”—as the duration-weighted average of emotional experiences across all episodes.
However, it remains unclear whether this is actually how people evaluate their day. In existing well-being research using the DRM, this assumption has rarely been questioned or tested empirically. Other psychological studies, including those by Kahneman himself, suggest that retrospective evaluations of experiences often follow different cognitive rules—such as the peak–end rule (judging experiences by their most intense and final moments) or duration neglect (disregarding how long episodes lasted).
This project examines how people truly aggregate their emotional experiences when evaluating their day. Using novel data from the German Job Seeker Panel (GJSP)—to our knowledge, the first DRM study that also asks respondents to rate their overall emotional experience of the day—we will test which aggregation models best predict people’s overall evaluations. By comparing the predictive power of duration-weighted averages, peak–end models, and other heuristics, this study will provide new insights into how individuals form summary judgments of their daily well-being and improve the interpretation of time-use and well-being data.

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While studies of global life evaluation mainly reaffirm the undesirable impacts of unemployment on subjective well-being, there are only few studies examining its impact on daily emotional experiences. In this project, we attempt to examine the impact of unemployment on different aspects of subjective well-being, particularly the emotional well-being experienced on a day-to-day basis and the channels through which unemployment influences these experiences, using micro data from the UK (UK Time-Use Survey) and the US (American Time-Use Survey). A previous study by Knabe et al. (2010) showed that unemployment is negatively linked to how individuals assess their general life and the level of pleasure they attain while doing an activity, but hardly has an effect on the emotional balance over the course of the day. The conflicting finding was obtained by Krueger and Mueller (2012) who reported that jobless people felt significantly sadder than employed people both in participation of specific activities and on an average of the day.

Building on these previous studies, we will extent this line of research in several dimensions. We take into account the differentiation of time-use and well-being by gender, by days of the weeks and by social contact possibilities. Furthermore, we will provide attempts to identify the origin and magnitude of saddening effect by examining the relationship between social contacts and time composition.

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