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SOEP Brown Bag Seminar
We study the wage and employment effects of a German place-based policy using a research design that exploits conditionally exogenous EU-wide rules governing the program parameters at the regional level. The place-based program subsidizes investments to create jobs with a subsidy rate that varies across labor market regions. The analysis uses matched data on the universe of establishments and...
02.07.2025| Mirko Titze, The Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH)
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Research Project
This research project examines the revenue and distributional effects of a wealth tax on households in Germany. Various scenarios with progressive tax rates and high personal allowances are analyzed, including special provisions for business assets, real estate, and retirement savings. The simulation calculations are based on microdata from the PHF/HFCS and SOEP, supplemented by additional...
Current Project| Public Economics
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt taking. We show suggestive evidence for a link between overconfidence and borrowing behavior in a representative survey of German households (German Socio-Economic Panel–Innovation Sample [GSOEP-IS]). This motivates a laboratory experiment to study causality behind these effects. In two experiments, ...
In:
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
(2025), im Ersch. [online first: 2024-05-24]
| Antonia Grohmann, Lukas Menkhoff, Christoph Merkle, Renke Schmacker
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Existing research has demonstrated that wealthier individuals differ in family formation. Potential explanations draw on wealth’s use and symbolic value as well as the relative economic bar of family formation. This study examines the relationship between wealth and three family formation events in Germany: first cohabitation, marriage, and birth. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (2002–2017) ...
In:
European Journal of Population
41 (2025), 1, Art. 16, 24 S.
| Philipp M. Lersch
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Diskussionspapiere 2125 / 2025
This paper examines the gendered impact of divorce on earnings and the role of the social policy context in shaping this relationship. In particular, it focuses on a policy reform enacted in Germany in 2008 that overturned previous ex-spousal support rules. Data come from the administrative records of the German Public Pension Fund. Drawing on a fixed- effects model, we study the behaviour of women ...
2025| Michaela Kreyenfeld, Sarah Schmauk, Katharina Wrohlich, Daniel Brüggmann
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SOEPpapers 1226 / 2025
While the body of literature on the non-take-up of public aid has grown substantially in recent years, a notable gap remains in the literature of non-take-up rates for student aid programs, where research is still extremely limited. This paper examines the non-take-up rate of Germany’s federal student aid program BAföG by creating a microsimulation based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel ...
2025| Alexander Eriksson Byström, María Sól Antonsdóttir
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Diskussionspapiere 2123 / 2025
How does basic income (a regular, unconditional, guaranteed cash transfer) impact labor supply? We show that in search models of the labor market with income effects, this impact is theoretically ambiguous: Employment and job durations might increase or decrease, match surplus might be shifted to workers or employers, and worker surplus might be reallocated between wages and job amenities. We thus ...
2025| Sarah Bernhard, Sandra Bohmann, Susann Fiedler, Maximilian Kasy, Jürgen Schupp, Frederik Schwerter
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Other refereed articles
Earnings are often top-coded (right-censored) in administrative registers. The censoring threshold in the case of Germany is the limit value for social security contributions, leading to a substantial fraction of censoring: For example, about 12%of male workers inWest Germany are affected, rising to above 30% for highly educated prime-aged workers. This missing right tail of the earnings distribution ...
In:
Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik
(2025), im Ersch. [online first:2025-05-23]
| Mattis Beckmannshagen, Johannes König, Isabella Retter, Christian Schluter, Carsten Schröder, Yogam Tchokni
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Who makes it to the top? We use the leading socio-economic survey in Germany, supplemented by extensive data on the rich, to answer this question. We identify the key predictors for belonging to the top 1 percent of income, wealth, and both distributions jointly. Although we consider many, only a few traits matter: Entrepreneurship and self-employment in conjunction with a sizable inheritance of company ...
In:
The Review of Income and Wealth
71 (2025), 2, e70015, 19 S.
| Johannes König, Christian Schluter, Carsten Schröder
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Refereed essays Web of Science
By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20% of the West German housing stock had been destroyed. Building on a theoretical life-cycle model, this paper examines the persistent consequences of the war for individual wealth across generations. As our empirical basis, we link a unique historical dataset on the levels of wartime destruction in 1739 West German cities with micro data on individual ...
In:
Journal of Economic Growth
30 (2025), S. 161–235
| Christoph Halbmeier, Carsten Schröder