Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Unemployment and Mortality: A Comparative Study of Germany and the United States

Objectives. We examined the relationship between unemployment and mortality in Germany, a coordinated market economy, and the United States, a liberal market economy. Methods. We followed 2 working-age cohorts from the German Socio-economic Panel and the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1984 to 2005. We defined unemployment as unemployed at the time of survey. We used discrete-time survival analysis, ...

Market, State, and the Quality of New Self-Employment Jobs among Men in the U.S. and Western Germany

Recent scholarship suggests that a new form of low-quality, contingent self-employment is taking hold in postindustrial economies. Using longitudinal data on men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and theGerman Socio-Economic Panel, I find that on average men in Germany and the U.S. do not fare poorly in self-employment, and in both countries a substantial number of new self-employment jobs offer ...

Pathways into Self-Employment in the United States and Germany

Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socio-Economic Panel, this research compares pathways into self-employment among men and women in the United States and Western Germany. Academic and vocational credentials are more important for stabilizing self-employment in the United States than in Germany, where the lack of credentials is a significant deterrent to ...

Married Women’s Work Trajectories and Income Inequality in Germany, Great Britain and the United States

We investigate the impact of married women's breadwinner roles on income inequality in the United States, Germany and Britain. We use longitudinal data and fixed effects time series with lagged endogenous panel regression models to investigate the evolution of couples work careers and women’s earnings in the first five years following union formation. Results from these models are then used to ...

Wage Penalty for Motherhood in Context: Economic Consequences of Motherhoode in the United States and Germany

Women earn less than men, and among women, mothers earn less than non-mothers. Recent evidence reaffirms the importance of parenthood in accounting for the persistent gender gap in earnings in the United States, but the mechanisms that account for this gap are not undisputed, and the wage penalty for motherhood remains poorly understood. Against this background, the paper examines wage penalties for ...

Economic Growth and Income Inequalities (Chapter 6)

Emotions, Risk Attitudes, and Patience

Previous work has shown that preferences are not always stable across time, but surprisingly little is known about the reasons for this instability. I examine whether variation in people’s emotions over time predicts changes in preferences. Using a large panel data set, I find that within-person changes in happiness, anger, and fear have substantial effects on risk attitudes and patience. Robustness ...

Is Volunteering Rewarding in Itself?

Public-private sector wage differentials in Germany: Evidence from quantile regression

This paper measures and decomposes the differences in earnings distributions between public sector and private sector employees in Germany for the years 1984-2001. Oaxaca decomposition results suggest that conditional wages are higher in the public sector for women but lower for men. Using the quantile regression decomposition technique proposed by Machado and Mata (2004), we find that the conditional ...

The Role of Economic Statistics in the German Unification Process