Martin Binder

The Regional Dimension of Knowledge Transfers—A Behavioral Approach

Innovations are inherently connected to knowledge transfers. The need of face‐to‐face contacts to transfer tacit knowledge is commonly argued to cause a regional dimension of innovative activities. The paper presents an alternative explanation based on a model of boundedly rational actors who search for knowledge. It is shown that a regional dimension exists in these processes that results from a regional bias in an actors search activities. Social embeddedness, a shared regional identity and limited spatial mobility foster this bias. We argue that insights from research on these topics can help to define the geographic size of a region.

The Structure of Subjective Well‐Being: A Vector Autoregressive Approach

We use panel vector autoregressions to analyze the underlying structure of changes in subjective well-being and its coevolution with changes in income, health, worries, marital status and employment status for the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data set. We find that positive changes in the named life domains are followed by decreases in subjective well-being (except for health, which is followed by well-being increases). Positive changes in well-being are followed by positive changes in most life domains. We also examine how the structure of subjective well-being differs with respect to different Big Five personality traits.

Applying a non-parametric efficiency analysis to measure conversion efficiency in Great Britain

In the literature on Sen’s capability approach, studies focusing on the empirical measurement of conversion factors are comparatively rare. We add to this field by adopting a measure of ‘conversion efficiency’ that captures the efficiency with which individuals convert their resources into achieved functioning. We use a non‐parametric efficiency procedure borrowed from production theory and construct such a measure for a set of basic functionings, using data from the 2005 wave of the British Household Panel Survey. In Great Britain, 49.88% of the individuals can be considered efficient while the mean of the inefficient individuals reaches one‐fifth less functioning achievement. An individual’s conversion efficiency is positively affected by getting older, being self‐employed, married, having no health problems and living in the London area. On the other hand, being unemployed, separated/divorced/widowed and (self‐assessed) disabled decrease an individual’s conversion efficiency.

How Satisfied are the Self-Employed? A Life Domain View

It is well-known in the literature that self-employment positively influences job satisfaction, but the effects on other life domains and overall life satisfaction are much less clear. Our study analyzes the welfare effects of self-employment apart from its monetary aspects, and focuses on the overall life satisfaction as well as different domain satisfactions of self-employed individuals in our German sample from 1997 to 2010. Using matching estimators to create an appropriate control group and differentiating between different types of self-employment, we find that voluntary self-employment brings with it positive benefits apart from work satisfaction, and leads to higher overall life satisfaction as well as increased health satisfaction, all of which increase in the first three years of self-employment. Being forced into self-employment to escape unemployment, however, confers no such benefits. Additionally, both types of self-employment lead to increasing dissatisfaction with one’s leisure time.

Unemployment impacts differently on the extremes of the distribution of a comprehensive well-being measure

Unemployment has a heterogeneous effect on well-being. We combine a quantile analysis with matching techniques to analyse the negative impact of unemployment along the well-being distribution of a comprehensive well-being variable. In our analysis of British Household Panel Survey data (1996–2008) we focus on transitions into unemployment and find that average effects of unemployment on a comprehensive well-being variable are less strong than on typical life satisfaction measures. The effect of unemployment on a broad mental well-being variable (GHQ-12) is reversed and mentally less well-off individuals suffer from unemployment more strongly than those scoring high in mental well-being.