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DIW Discussion Papers 1514 / 2015
This paper uncovers ongoing trends in idiosyncratic earnings volatility across generations by decomposing residual earnings auto-covariances into a permanent and a transitory component. We employ data on complete earnings life cycles forprime age men born 1935 through 1974 that covers earnings between 1960 and 2009. Over this period, the German labor market undergoes a heavy transformation and experiences ...
2015| Timm Bönke, Matthias Giesecke, Holger Lüthen
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SOEPpapers 792 / 2015
In this paper, we decompose body mass index (BMI) differences between Turkish immigrants and Germans in West Germany for women and men. We focus on isolating the part of BMI differences that can be explained by differences in observed socioeconomic status from the part attributable to differences in coefficients. Our results reveal that female Turkish immigrants are on average more obese than female ...
2015| Rui Dang
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SOEPpapers 794 / 2015
This paper investigates whether individual control-perception affects the probability of becoming poor, and vice versa, whether poverty experiences can be detrimental to these traits later on. The former relation is intuitive as control related traits underly many idiosyncratic determinants of poverty. Though traits like control-perception are known to stabilize towards adulthood, the latter association ...
2015| Hendrik Thiel, Stephan L. Thomsen
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Non-refereed Articles
Childhood is a unique period of human development, and a critical phase for preparing future societies to be prosperous and sustainable. This chapter discusses the main measurement issues in child well-being, and then presents evidence of how children fare in 10 aspects of their lives. The analysis shows that a significant number of children live in poverty and in workless households in many OECD countries, ...
In:
How's Life ? 2015 : Measuring Well-being
Paris: OECD
S. 141–188
| Dominic Richardson, Clara Welteke
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DIW Roundup 87 / 2015
Climate policy consistent with the 2°C target needs to install mechanisms that leave most current coal reserves unburned. Demand-side policies have been argued to be prone to adverse carbon leakage and “green paradox” effects. A growing strain of literature argues in favor of supply-side policies in order to curb future coal consumption. Various concepts with analogies in other sectors are currently ...
2015| Kim Collins, Roman Mendelevitch
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SOEPpapers 810 / 2015
It is still widely debated how non-cognitive skills can be affected by policy intervention. For example, universal music education programs are becoming increasingly popular among policy makers in Germany and other developed countries. These are intended to give children from poor families the opportunity to learn a musical instrument. Moreover, policymakers present these programs as innovative policies ...
2015| Adrian Hille
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SOEPpapers 809 / 2015
This paper argues for the central role of risk aversion in shaping political ideology. We develop a political economy model, which makes explicit the link between risk aversion, the labor market, government policy, and ideology. Our model distinguishes the effects of risk aversion from unemployment risk and our evidence sheds light on debates over explanations for the welfare state. We test our model ...
2015| Matthew Dimick, Daniel Stegmueller
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DIW Discussion Papers 1533 / 2015
Open access means that research outputs, such as articles and data, are free of restrictions on access and free of restrictions on use. In the light of recent market developments in academic publishing, we argue in this essay that the discourse about open access must include a discussion about research infrastructure and innovation in academic publishing.
2015| Benedikt Fecher, Gert G. Wagner
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SOEPpapers 806 / 2015
The affordability of housing has become a major topic of discussion in Germany among both social scientists and the public at large. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we provide rent-income ratios over more than two decades and show how they change with households’ disposable needs-adjusted income. We find a substantial increase in the ratios over the 1990s. In the decade that ...
2015| Teresa Backhaus, Kathrin Gebers, Carsten Schröder
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SOEPpapers 807 / 2015
This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person’s position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person’s life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to laterborns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality ...
2015| Julia M. Rohrer, Boris Egloff, Stefan C. Schmukle