SOEPpapers

The Effects of 9/11 on Attitudes toward Immigration and the Moderating Role of Education

The major event of the 9/11 terror attacks is likely to have induced an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiments, not only among US residents but also beyond US borders. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and exploiting exogenous variation in interview timing throughout 2001, I find that the terror attacks in the US caused an immediate shift of around 40 percent ...

Occupational Choice and Self-Employment: Are They Related?

Often, a person will become an entrepreneur only after a period of dependent employment, suggesting that occupational choices precede entrepreneurial choices. We investigate the relationship between occupational choice and self-employment. The findings suggest that the occupational choice of future entrepreneurs at the time of labor market entry is partly guided by a taste for skill variety, the prospect ...

The Aggregate Effects of the Hartz Reforms in Germany

This paper quantifies the impact of the Hartz reforms on matching efficiency, using monthly SOEP gross worker flows (1983-2009). We show that, until the early 2000s, close to 60% of changes in the unemployment rate are due to changes in the inflow rate (job separation). On the contrary, since the implementation of the reforms in the mid-2000s, the importance of the outflow rate (job finding) has been ...

The Type to Train? Impacts of Personality Characteristics on Further Training Participation

Personality traits drive behaviors and attitudes, and determine socio-economic life outcomes for individuals. This paper investigates the relationship of six personality traits, the Big Five and Locus of Control, to individual participation in employment-related further education and training (FET) in a longitudinal perspective. Initial research suggests that training is a crucial determinant of life ...

The Treatment Effect of Attending a High-Quality School and the Influence of Unobservables

This paper studies the effect of attending a high-quality secondary school on subsequent educational outcomes. The analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study in which we observe children when they make their secondary school choice (between ages 10-12) and later when they self-report on their intentions with regard to their further educational path (between ages 16-17). To ...

The Role of Family Risk Attitudes in Education and Intergenerational Mobility: An Empirical Analysis

This paper analyses the role of family risk attitudes in intergenerational mobility in incomes and education. Based on 1984-2009 data of sons and fathers from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, there is evidence suggesting that sons with risk taking fathers have a significantly higher educational mobility and persistently higher income mobility than peers with risk averse fathers. They obtain ...

The Effect of Education on Fertility: Evidence from a Compulsory Schooling Reform

This paper investigates the effect of education on fertility under inflexible labor market conditions. We exploit exogenous variation from a German compulsory schooling reform to deal with the endogeneity of education. By using data from two complementary data sets, we examine different fertility outcomes over the life cycle. In contrast to evidence for other developed countries, we find that increased ...

Does Subsidizing Investments in Energy Efficiency Reduce Energy Consumption? Evidence from Germany

Improving energy efficiency is one of the three pillars of the European energy and climate targets for 2020 and has led to the introduction of several policy measures to promote energy efficiency. The paper analyzes the effectiveness of subsidies in increasing energy efficiency in residential dwellings. An empirical analysis is conducted in which the effectiveness of subsidies on the number of dwelling ...

Happy Taxpayers? Income Taxation and Well-Being

This paper offers a first empirical investigation of how labor taxation (income and payroll taxes) affects individuals' well-being. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in tax rules over time and across demographic groups using 26 years of German panel data. We find that the tax effect on subjective well-being is significant and positive when controlling for income net of taxes. This ...

Comparing Labor Supply Elasticities in Europe and the US: New Results

We suggest the first large-scale international comparison of labor supply elasticities for 17 European countries and the US, separately by gender and marital status. Measurement differences are netted out by using a harmonized empirical approach and comparable data sources. We find that own-wage elasticities are relatively smalland much more uniform across countries than previously thought. Differences ...

Merkmale und Einschätzungen der Bewohner von Wohnungsgenossenschaften: eine Charakterisierung auf Basis des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels

Shall I Help You My Dear? Examining Variations in Social Support for Career Advancement within Partnerships

Strong gender inequalities persist in the career advancement of men and women. Vertical and horizontal dimensions of segregation, gender role beliefs, and the public provision of welfare services all provide explanations for gender inequalities. Much less is known about the social mechanisms at work within couples, however. Following the notion of linked lives, the present study investigates the provision ...

Why Are Educated and Risk-Loving Persons More Mobile across Regions?

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro data on internal migrants from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000-2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances across German regions constructed from historical local dialect patterns. Our findings indicate that risk-loving ...

Lebenszufriedenheit in Westdeutschland: eine Querschnittsanalyse mit den Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels

Hintergrund: Die Zufriedenheit mit dem Leben ist in der heutigen Gesellschaft ein bedeutender Aspekt geworden und nahezu jeder Mensch strebt danach. Eine Vielzahl an Determinanten, wie Gesundheit, Wohlbefinden, Lebensqualität etc. sind mit der Lebenszufriedenheit verbunden und beeinflussen dieses Konstrukt. Die Wissenschaft hat sich diese Thematik zu nutze gemacht und nähert sich der Lebenszufriedenheit ...

The Impact of the German Child Benefit on Child Well-Being

The German Child Benefit ("Kindergeld") is paid to legal guardians of children as a cash benefit. This study employs exogenous variations in the amount of child benefit received by households to investigate the extent to which these various changes have translated into an improvement in the circumstances of children related to their well-being. I use the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate the ...

Do Ethnic Enclaves Impede Immigrants' Integration? Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Social-Interaction Approach

It is widely debated whether immigrants who live among co-ethnics are less willing to integrate into the host society. Exploiting the quasi-experimental guest worker placement across German regions during the 1960/70s as well as information on immigrants' inter-ethnic contact networks and social activities, we are able to identify the causal effect of ethnic concentration on social integration. The ...

Impacts of an Ageing Society on Macroeconomics and Income Inequality: The Case of Germany since the 1980s

The discussion paper is concerned with the interplay between demography and macroeconomics on one hand and macroeconomics and income inequality on the other hand. For this purpose, several estimation equations are derived by econometric methods (on the empirical basis of the 1984-2010 German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) waves). In concrete terms, the macroeconomic variables inflation, economic growth, ...

The "Bomb" Risk Elicitation Task

This paper presents the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task (BRET), an intuitive procedure aimed at measuring risk attitudes. Subjects decide how many boxes to collect out of 100, one of which containing a bomb. Earnings increase linearly with the number of boxes accumulated but are zero if the bomb is also collected. The BRET requires minimal numeracy skills, avoids truncation of the data, allows to precisely ...

The Course of Subjective Sleep Quality in Middle and Old Adulthood and Its Relation to Physical Health

Objective: Older adults more often complain about sleep disturbances compared to younger adults. However, it is not clear whether there is still a decline of sleep qualityafter age 60 and whether changes in sleep quality in old age are mere reflections of impaired physical health or whether they represent a normative age dependent development. Method: Subjective sleep quality and perceived physical ...

Offshoring and Labor Income Risk: An Empirical Investigation

This paper analyses how increased offshoring impacts on labor income risk. It is therefore distinct from a large number of studies explaining the level effects of globalization on the labor market in that it takes a look at effects on the variability of incomes. It provides an assessment that directly connects labor income risk and offshoring trends in a panel setting at the industry level. Importantly, ...