SOEP Research: Inequality and Mobility

A Forgotten Issue: Distributional Effects of Day Care Subsidies in Germany

In general, day care subsidies are accepted as a means of creating equal chances for both children and mothers in the labour market. Although there is a broad consensus that the use of children's day care should be publicly supported, there is no consensus on how this should be done. Moreover, there is little knowledge on the distributional effects of day care subsidies. In order to assess whether ...

Too Few Women in Top Posts

Poverty in Western and Eastern Germany: A Detailed Comparison

Analysing the Dynamics of Social Change in Europe

Smoke Signals: The Intergenerational Transmission of Smoking Behavior

In this paper, we investigate the intergenerational transmission of smoking behavior from parents to their children using data from the German Socio- Economic Panel, surveyed in 1999 including 813 youths aged 16 through 19. We find strong evidence, that parental smoking significantly increases the probability that their children likewise become smokers. Youths living in families with both parents smoking ...

Modelling Low Income Transitions

We examine the determinants of low income transitions using first-order Markov models that control for initial conditions effects (those found to be poor in the base year may be a nonrandom sample) and for attrition (panel retention may also be non-random). Our econometric model is a form of endogeneous switching regression, and is fitted using simulated maximum likelihood methods. The estimates, derived ...

Long-Term Effects of Unpaid Overtime

Why do people work unpaid overtime? We show that remarkable long-term labor earnings gains are associated with unpaid overtime in West Germany. A descriptive analysis suggests that over a 10-year period workers with unpaid overtime experience on average at least a 10 percentage points higher increase in real labor earnings than their co-workers. Applying panel data models this result generally holds. ...

The Effect of Maternity Leave on Women's Pay in Germany 1984-1994

In 1986 German federal parental leave and benefit policy was expanded in several ways, extending the potential duration of leave from six to ten months and paying child-rearing benefits to all new mothers regardless of their employment status before childbirth. The potential duration has increased four times since 1986 and stood at 18 months in 1991 and three years starting in 1992. This study uses ...

The Effect of Family Income during Childhood on Later-life Attainment: Evidence from Germany

We examine the impact of family income during childhood on the type of secondary school that German children attend, a good indicator of their lifetime socioeconomic attainment. By contrast with several US child outcome studies, we find that late-childhood income is a more important determinant of outcomes than early-childhood income, and income effects are not greater for poor households compared ...

Accounting for Poverty Differences between the United States, Great Britain, and Germany

We propose a framework for comparing the relationship between poverty and personal characteristics across countries (or across years), and use it to compare levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. The higher aggregate poverty rates in the USA and in Britain relative to Germany were mostly accounted for by higher poverty rates conditional on characteristics, ...