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SOEPpapers 954 / 2017
In numerous industrialized countries the demographic change erodes the financial basis of traditional pay-as-you-go pension systems. To compensate for decreasing statutory pensions, many governments incentivize private saving by meansof subsidized retirement plans. In this context, Germany introduced the so-called Riester pension plans. To assess its effectiveness, this paper analyzes the effects of ...
2017| Dorothee Ihle
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SOEPpapers 953 / 2017
A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile this puzzle by generalizing the optimal taxation framework by Saez (2002) to allow for alternatives to welfarism. ...
2017| Robin Jessen, Maria Metzing, Davud Rostam-Afschar
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SOEPpapers 952 / 2017
This paper uses information on the legal status upon arrival to study long-term labor market effects, whereas selection and potential outmigration are taken into account by a large set of methods. I find that immigrants arrived with a job commitment in Germany achieve a longterm income advantage of 18.6% relative to other migrant groups, while language skills and ethnic networks can be excluded as ...
2017| Eric Schuss
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SOEPpapers 951 / 2017
The notion of person-environment fit implies that personal and contextual factors interact in influencing important life outcomes. Using data from 8,458 employed individuals, we examined the combined effects of individuals' actual personality traits and jobs’ expert-rated personality demands on earnings. Results from a response surface analysis indicated that the fit between individuals’ actual personality ...
2017| Jaap J. A. Denissen, Wiebke Bleidorn, Marie Hennecke, Maike Luhmann, Ulrich Orth, Jule Specht, Julia Zimmermann
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SOEPpapers 950 / 2017
We assess the short-term employment effects of the introduction of a national statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015. For this purpose, we exploit variation in the regional treatment intensity, assuming that the stronger a minimum wage 'bites' into the regional wage distribution, the stronger the regional labour market will be affected. In contrast to previous studies, we draw upon detailed individual ...
2017| Marco Caliendo, Alexandra Fedorets, Malte Preuss, Carsten Schröder, Linda Wittbrodt
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SOEPpapers 949 / 2017
Despite some skepticism among experts about the effects of a minimum wage, there is remarkably widespread public support for such policies. Using representative survey data from 2015 and 2016, we investigate the subjective attitudes driving public support for Germany’s recent minimum wage reform. We find that socio-economic characteristics and political orientations explain a minor part of the variation ...
2017| Alexandra Fedorets, Carsten Schröder
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SOEPpapers 948 / 2017
This study quantifies the short-term distributional effects of the new statutory minimum wage in Germany. Using detailed survey data (German Socio-Economic Panel), we assess changes in the distributions of hourly wages, contractual and actual working hours, and monthly earnings. Our descriptive results indicate growth at the bottom of the hourly wage distribution in the post-reform year, but also considerable ...
2017| Marco Caliendo, Alexandra Fedorets, Malte Preuss, Carsten Schröder, Linda Wittbrodt
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SOEPpapers 947 / 2017
Despite lower incomes the self-employed often report higher job satisfaction. But this increased job satisfaction only sometimes translates into higher life satisfaction, likely due to the heterogeneous nature of self-employment. By distinguishingdifferent types of self-employment, this paper sheds light onto why some self-employeds even report lower life satisfaction, focussing specifically on poor ...
2017| Martin Binder
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SOEPpapers 946 / 2017
We investigate the causal effect of commuting on sickness absence from work using German panel data. To address reverse causation, we use changes in commuting distance for employees who stay with the same employer and who have the same residence during the period of observation. In contrast to previous papers, we do not observe that commuting distances are associated with higher sickness absence, in ...
2017| Laszlo Goerke, Olga Lorenz
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SOEPpapers 945 / 2017
This study addresses the difficulty in linking ethnic discrimination and integration outcomes of immigrants in empirical research. Many of the existing studies look at the relationship between perceived discrimination and integration, but most are based on cross-sectional data. We argue that perceived discrimination should not be taken as an accurate indicator of actual experiences of discrimination, ...
2017| Claudia Diehl, Elisabeth Liebau
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SOEPpapers 944 / 2017
Personality is a powerful predictor of central life outcomes, including subjective well-being. Yet, we still know little about how personality manifests in the very last years of life when well-being typically falls rapidly. Here, we investigate whether the Big Five personality traits buffer (or magnify) terminal decline in well-being beyond and in interaction with functioning in key physical and social ...
2017| Swantje Mueller, Jenny Wagner, Gert G. Wagner, Nilam Ram, Denis Gerstorf
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SOEPpapers 943 / 2017
Due to its extraordinary explanatory power for individual behavior, the interest in the concept of locus of control (LOC) has increased substantially within applied economic research. But, even though LOC has been found to affect economic behavior in many ways, the reliability of these findings is at risk as they commonly rely on the assumption that LOC is stable over the life course. While absolute ...
2017| Malte Preuss, Juliane Hennecke
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SOEPpapers 942 / 2017
The 2008 alimony reform in Germany considerably reduced post-marital and caregiver alimony. We analyze how individuals adapted to these changed rulings in terms of labor supply, the intra-household allocation of leisure, and marital stability. We use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and conduct a difference-in-difference analysis to investigate couples’ behavioral responses to the reform. The ...
2017| Julia Bredtmann, Christina Vonnahme
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SOEPpapers 941 / 2017
An increasing proportion of people choose to follow a vegetarian diet. To date, however, little is known about if and how individual differences in personality relate to following a vegetarian diet. In the two studies presented here, we aimed to (1) estimate the prevalence of self-defined vegetarians in two waves of a German representative sample (N = 4,496 and 5,125, respectively), (2) analyze the ...
2017| Tamara M. Pfeiler, Boris Egloff
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SOEPpapers 940 / 2017
The 1990s and 2000s were a gloomy period for Germany’s working class, hit by mass unemployment, welfare retrenchment and wage stagnation. We examine whether the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom of Germany’s class structure was accompanied by a widening class gap in life satisfaction. We analyse whether there is a social class gradient in life satisfaction and whether, over ...
2017| Oliver Lipps, Daniel Oesch
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SOEPpapers 939 / 2017
Economic theory predicts market failure in the market for early childhood education and care (ECEC) due to information asymmetries. We empirically investigate information asymmetries between parents and ECEC professionals in Germany, making use of a unique extension of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). It allows us to compare quality perceptions by parents and pedagogic staff of 734 ECEC ...
2017| Georg F. Camehl, Pia S. Schober, C. Katharina Spieß
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SOEPpapers 938 / 2017
The aim of this paper is to construct the “space of capital” based on disaggregated measures of capital portfolios and to analyze the dynamics of class mobility over time. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “social space”, we argue that it is possible to directly assess the structural dimensions of the social space as a space of (economic and cultural) capital, including wealth as an important ...
2017| Nora Waitkus, Olaf Groh-Samberg
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SOEPpapers 937 / 2017
Motivations to participate in the labour market as well as to invest in labour market skills are crucial forthe successful integration of refugees. In this paper we use a unique dataset – the IAB-BAMF-SOEPRefugee Survey, which is a representative longitudinal study of all refugees reported on administrativerecords in Germany – and analyse which determinants and characteristics are correlated with highmotivation ...
2017| Peter Haan, Martin Kroh, Kent Troutman
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SOEPpapers 936 / 2017
Long considered the classic coordinated market economy featuring employment security and relatively little employment precarity, the German labor market has undergone profound changes in recent decades. We assess the evidence for a rise in precarious employment in Germany from 1984 to 2013. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) through the Luxembourg Income Study, we examine low-wage ...
2017| David Brady, Thomas Biegert
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SOEPpapers 935 / 2017
Using a representative sample of the German adult population, this paper investigates the extent to which a survey measure of present bias predicts present-biased choice behavior in incentive-compatible experiments and real-world outcomes related to in-vestments in financial assets and human capital. The results are threefold. First, the survey and experimental measures of present bias are significantly ...
2017| Pia R. Pinger