Does a Better Job Match Make Women Happier?: Work Orientations, Work-Care Choices and Subjective Well-Being in Germany

The study examines the effects of work orientations and work-leisure choices alongside the effect of genes or personality traits on subjective well-being (SWB). The former effects are assumed to be mediated by the match between women's preferred and actual number of working hours indicating labor market and time constraints. Data come from 24 waves of the German (SOEP) Household Panel (1984-2007). Random and fixed-effect panel regression models are estimated. Work orientations and work-leisure choices indeed matter for women's SWB but the effects are strongly mediated by the job match especially for younger birth cohorts and higher educated women. Therefore, apart from the impact of genes or personality traits preferences and choices as well as labor market and time constraints matter significantly for the well-being of women, providing partial support to the role (scarcity-expansion) theory and the combination pressure thesis while at the same time challenging set-point theory.Subjective well-being, set-point theory, life satisfaction, preference formation theory, role (scarcity-expansion) theory, job match, work-leisure choices, panel regression models

Agriculture Diversity: Forestry in Costa Rica

Although enlightenment may have come to forestry students of the 1980\u27s, my undergraduate days in the late 1960\u27s at the University of Michigan contained little education in tropical forestry. I thought of forestry in Latin America in terms of vast rain forests or jungles\u27\u27. Disillusionment was rapid during two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1970\u27s working with a United Nations agricultural diversification project in Costa Rica. While smaller than Iowa, Costa Rica has nineteen vegetation zones based on Holdridge\u27s life zone classification. Within the 90 miles from Pacific to Alantic Oceans, forest communities change from the very dry savanna conditions, up the mountains to subalpine cloud forests and back down to the Alantic lowland rain forests with over 20 feet of annual precipitation. With this diversity, general statements about tropical forestry have little significance

Does a Better Job Match Make Women Happier? Work Orientations, Work-Care Choices and Subjective Well-Being in Germany

The study examines the effects of work orientations and work-leisure choices alongside the effect of genes or personality traits on subjective well-being (SWB). The former effects are assumed to be mediated by the match between women's preferred and actual number of working hours indicating labor market and time constraints. Data come from 24 waves of the German (SOEP) Household Panel (1984-2007). Random and fixed-effect panel regression models are estimated. Work orientations and work-leisure choices indeed matter for women's SWB but the effects are strongly mediated by the job match especially for younger birth cohorts and higher educated women. Therefore, apart from the impact of genes or personality traits preferences and choices as well as labor market and time constraints matter significantly for the well-being of women, providing partial support to the role (scarcity-expansion) theory and the combination pressure thesis while at the same time challenging set-point theory