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Short-time Work and Unemployment: Long-term Effects on Workers’ Labor-market Outcomes, Time Use and Life Satisfaction

Many countries use job-retention schemes, such as short-time work (STW), to stabilize the labor market during economic downturns. While these schemes might prevent unemployment (UE) and its adverse effects on workers, STW could also deter workers from moving to more productive firms, thereby negatively affecting their labor market outcomes in the long run. We analyze the long-term effects of STW and ...

The single bidding zone leads to grid congestion and costs – local market prices balance supply and demand regionally

Local Market Prices Can Reduce Electricity Costs

With the liberalization of the electricity markets in 1998, Germany opted for a single, nationwide wholesale price. Regional differences in supply and demand are not taken into account. In the event of grid congestion, electricity generators are paid to adjust their output. This leads to rising costs, an overestimation of grid expansion requirements and increased bureaucracy. Reforms are therefore ...

How a Mismatch Between Actual and Desired Fertility Relates to Well-Being Across Adulthood

Introduction Most people want two or more children, but many do not realize their fertility desires. At the same time, recent studies suggest that up to 15% of parents regret having children. To investigate how fertility mismatch relates to well-being (i.e., affect balance, life satisfaction, family life satisfaction, and work satisfaction), this preregistered study used nationally representative cross-sectional ...

Comparing External and Internal Instruments for Vector Autoregressions

In conventional proxy VAR analysis, the shocks of interest are identified by external instruments. This is typically accomplished by considering the covariance of the instruments and the reducedform residuals. Alternatively, the instruments may be internalized by augmenting the VAR process by the instruments or proxies. These alternative identification methods are compared and it is shown that the ...

SOEP-Core – 2024: Haushaltszusammensetzung (PAPI, Stichproben A-R+M1-M2+M7)

Firms, Workers, and Households in Times of Crisis and Digital Transformation

We are pleased to invite submissions for our workshop taking place on November 26-27, 2026 at DIW Berlin. The workshop is part of the SOEP-LEE2 project and brings together research on resilience, crisis responses, digital transformation, and cyber security, with a particular emphasis on empirical work using survey and linked data on firms, employees, and households. It will also showcase new data...

The Value of Care: Brokering Work Conditions and Wages within a Transnational Care System

This article explains how the triadic brokering system in the European Union affects the conditions of work and pay of mobile care workers. Using original survey data gathered from Polish care workers in Germany, the authors found that workers earn less money the more hours they work. Based on qualitative interviews with care workers and representatives of labor market intermediaries, they argue that ...

Public Sector Relocation and Regional Development in Germany

As regional economic disparities within countries grow, governments are increasingly experimenting with public employment reallocation as a place-based policy. In this paper, I estimate the causal effect on local labor markets of a German policy that relocated about 3,000 public sector jobs to lagging regions. Using novel data on 60 agency relocations from 2015–2025, I estimate employment and...

Measurement error models on anonymized georeferenced data

Georeferenced data are often anonymized for data protection reasons. This is done either by aggregating the data into larger spatial units (e.g., higher-level administrative units or grids with larger cell sizes) or by using stochastic methods to deliberately overlay the original coordinates. These methods significantly distort the data and associated variables, making further modeling steps...