Topic Education

Individual Rationality and Learning: Welfare Expectations in East Germany Post-Reunification

Economic and Social Perspectives of Immigrant Children in Germany

Overall, children in Germany live in households with below average incomes; therefore social policies that address the vulnerable position of Germany's children are necessary. These policies should cover targeted financial transfers as well as improvements in day care provision for children. With respect to selected non-monetary as well as monetary indicators our empirical analyses show significant ...

Cross-National Estimates of the Intergenerational Mobility in Earnings

This paper examines the similarity in the association between earnings of sons and fathers in Germany and the United States. It relaxes the log-linear functional form imposed in most studies of the intergenerational earnings association. Theory implies the relationship between earnings of fathers and sons could be nonlinear, especially at the tails of the distribution of earnings of fathers. When a ...

Income Mobility in the United States and Germany: A Comparison of Two Classes of Mobility Measures using the GSOEP, PSID, and CPS

The United States is often considered to be more free-wheeling and mobile than Germany; however, previous cross-national studies of income mobility find the oppositeis true. This paper investigates these surprising results and finds that they are confirmed when income mobility is measured by changes in the positions of individuals inthe income distribution - members of former West German households ...

Success at Work, Life Patterns, and Overall Life Satisfaction: Changes in the Lives of Men and Women since the 1980s in West Germany

This paper focuses on the structural relationship between family building and upward mobility. Typically this relationship is analyzed for women only, while we include men as well. With new patterns of intimate partnerships and non-traditional families, on the one hand, and a changing labor market, on the other hand, new assertions about their connection have emerged. Using SOEP-data, the possible ...

Why do German Firms Subsidize Apprenticeship Training? Tests of the Asymmetric Information And Mobility Costs Explanation

It is often observed that despite the famous prediction of Becker (1962) that firms will not pay for general training, German firms do in fact subsidize apprenticeship training. This paper examines two prominent solutions to this puzzle - "asymmetric information" and "mobility costs." Our tests do not support the asymmetric information hypothesis, and, while they provide evidence consistent with a ...

Educational Opportunities of Children in Poverty

In this paper, I use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) to investigate whether and how a German youth' s choice of secondary school (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium) varies with the timing and duration of poverty experienced in childhood. To investigate what role the timing of poverty plays, I examine the correlation between educational choices and the poverty status of each child' ...

Life Course Risks, Mobility Regimes, and Mobility Consequences: A Comparison of Sweden, Germany and the U.S.

Intragenerational mobility has been a central concern in sociology, especially in the latter half of the 20th century. Most of this analysis has proceeded using measures of social position that are functions of an individual's occupation. This approach has been based on two primary justifications. First, occupational mobility is a key attribute of labor market structure, and the labor market, along ...

Early Career Experiences and Later Career Outcomes: Comparing the United States, France and Germany

This paper explores the links between individuals' early career experiences and their labor market outcomes 5 to 20 years later using data from France, (western) Germany, and the United States. Relative to most of the literature, we consider a large set of measures of men's early career experiences and later career outcomes. Our results differ significantly across countries. Labor market outcomes in ...

The Dynamics of Reservation Wages: Preliminary Evidence from the GSOEP

This paper presents preliminary results from an empirical analysis of the individual and macroeconomic deter-minants of reservation wages, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The longitudinal aspect of the dataset provides an interesting perspective on the dynamics of reservation wages and their correlations with accepted wage offers for workers who make the transition from unemployment ...