Doktorarbeit

The economic costs of life-course transitions

Abstract

This dissertation tackles the methodological challenges involved in estimating the effects of life-course transitions on economic well-being, and it investigates income, consumption, and subjective measures of well-being before and after these transitions. Additionally, new sources of data are taken into account to improve our understanding of why people move from one labor force status to another. The first chapter is a comparison of econometric methods applied to one dataset. The second chapter establishes an econometric framework, and discusses two applications. The third chapter generalizes the framework from the second chapter and applies it to German survey data. The fourth chapter uses existing labor market transition models, but adds a new source of data.