Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Effects of Incomplete Employee Wage Information: A Cross-Country Analysis

The Gender Pay Gap Across Countries: A Human Capital Approach

The gender wage gap varies across countries. For example, among OECD nations women in Australia, Belgium, Italy and Sweden earn 80% as much as males, whereas in Austria, Canada and Japan women earn about 60%. Current studies examining cross-country differences focus on the impact of labor market institutions such as minimum wage laws and nationwide collective bargaining. However, these studies neglect ...

Housing and health in Germany

Estimating a Life Cycle Model with Unemployment and Human Capital Depreciation

Robust Estimation of Wage Dispersion with Censored Data: An Application to Occupational Earnings Risk and Risk Attitudes

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment Sample (IABS). We then relate these robust measures of earnings risk to the risk attitudes of individuals working ...

Crowding-out of Unskilled Workers in the Business Cycle: Evidence from West Germany

Marriage and Earnings: Why Do Married Men Earn More than Single Men?

This article investigates how marriage affects the wages of men in Germany. A variety of reasons have been proposed for why married men earn higher wages than single men; however, previous tests of the leading explanations have been inconclusive. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, it is found that married men enjoy a wage premium even after controlling for self-selection into marriage. ...

Parenthood and Life Satisfaction: Why Don't Children Make People Happy?

Previous research on the association between parenthood and life satisfaction has shown that parents of minor children are not more satisfied with their lives than childless people. This study addressed the question of why children do not enhance their parents' life satisfaction. A major objective of this study was to determine whether and to what extent the costs of raising children act as suppressors ...

The Work and Wishes of Fathers: Actual and Preferred Work Hours among German Fathers

We examine the connection between fatherhood and employment hours using 30 years of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP 1985–2014). By inspecting how actual hours, preferred hours, and the correspondence between actual and preferred hours change during fatherhood, we clarify the interplay between fathers’ preferences and the labour market structures they encounter. We find that men born ...

Why does unemployment lead to divorce? Male-breadwinner norms and divorce risk in 30 countries

It is well known that unemployment and financial strain put pressure on relationships and increase the risk of divorce or separation. This applies to men's unemployment in particular , and earlier research has suggested that gender norms about employment in marriage might be relevant to explain why his job loss spurs more marital conflict than hers. While theoretically intuitive, most of the available ...