Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Development of Wage Inequality for Natives and Immigrants in Germany - Evidence from Quantile Regression and Decomposition

Bequests and labor supply in Germany

Little is known on the effects of inheritances on the working behavior of heirs. Using panel data for Germany, we find behavioral responses that amount up to a 16% reduction in working hours for inheritances of one Mio Euro. For the majority of beneficiaries labor supply effects are, however, modest (owing to small amounts of inherited wealth). These results remain robust if we restrict the sample ...

The Effect of Private Health Insurance on Self-assessed Health Status and Health Satisfaction in Germany

In Germany, private health insurance covers more innovative and costly treatments than public insurance. Moreover, privately insured individuals are treated preferentially by doctors. In this article, I use subjective health data to examine whether these superior features of private insurance actually transfer into better health. I focus on German adolescents who are still in education to control for ...

How Important is the Type of Working Contract for Job Satisfaction of Agency Workers?

Previous research has found that agency workers are less satisfied with their job than regular workers on a permanent contract. All these studies have in common that they treat agency workers as a homogeneous group; that is, they did not consider the contract type agency workers hold. This paper analyzes whether differences in job satisfaction can be explained by the contract type using data from the ...

The (Short-term) Individual Welfare Consequences of an Alcohol Ban

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the (short-term) welfare consequences of an alcohol ban. Using subjective well-being data to proxy individual welfare, I apply a regression discontinuity design where the date of the implementation of the ban in the German federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg functions as discontinuity. I find that the ban reduces life satisfaction of the total population ...

Relative income distribution in six European countries: market and disposable income

The relationship between income inequality and polarization is an empirical fact: a change in equality might occur together with a change in polarization. At the same time, polarization might emerge while inequality remains constant. The outcome of this process entails relevant information about the evolution of the income distribution. We exploit the LIS micro-data to perform a relative distribution ...

The Structure of Women's Employment in Comparative Perspective

Income Comparisons, Income Adaptation, and Life Satisfaction: How Robust Are Estimates from Survey Data?

Theory suggests that subjective well-being is affected by income comparisons and adaptation to income. Empirical tests of the effects often rely on self-constructed measures from survey data. This paper shows that results can be highly sensitive to simple parameter changes. Using large-scale panel data from Germany and the UK, I report cases where plausible variations in the underlying income type ...

Testing the Easterlin Hypothesis with Panel Data: The Dynamic Relationship Between Life Satisfaction and Economic Growth in Germany and in the UK

Recent studies focused on testing the Easterlin hypothesis (happiness and national income correlate in the cross-section but not over time) on a global level. We make a case for testing the Easterlin hypothesis at the country level where individual panel data allow exploiting important methodological advantages. Novelties of our test of the Easterlin hypothesis are a) long-term panel data and estimation ...

Status Attainment and Wealth in the United States and Germany