Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Gender, Household and Individual Income in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the USA and the UK

Impact of Life Events on the Dynamics of Well-Being: Natural Experiments embedded in multiple time-scale Designs

Session Abstracts: Lifespan theories of aging highlight the importance normative and non-normative life events have on how individuals function, develop, and age. In later adulthood, events such as the onset of severe illness or loss of a spouse may change both how individuals negotiate their daily lives and how they age. In this paper, we use a collection of natural experiments embedded in longitudinal ...

Who worries and who is happy? Explaining individual differences in worries and satisfaction by personality

Everyone Happy - Living Standards in Germany 25 Years after Reunification

Already a quarter of a century since the fall of the wall and the gap in living standards between eastern and western Germany is still not fully closed. Admittedly this could not realistically have been expected. Despite the increase in life satisfaction in eastern Germany, the east- west divide prevails. Evidence of this can be found in the latest data from the long-term Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) ...

What Matters in the Transition from School to Vocational Training in Germany. Educational Credentials, Cognitive Abilities or Personality?

The German multi-tiered school system functions as an institutional mechanism which prevents students from certain social class backgrounds from fulfilling their individual learning potential. Their cognitive abilities are not transformed into corresponding school performances and credentials. Against this backdrop, we ask whether the transition from school to vocational training may enable young people ...

Income Inequality over the Later-life Course: A Comparative Analysis of Seven OECD Countries

Wage Rigidities in Western Germany? Microeconometric Evidence from the 1990s

This paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been 'rigid' in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology which makes less restrictive identifying assumptions than some previous related work. I find that the relative stability of educational wage premia ...

A Test of the 'Krugman Hypothesis' for the United States, Britain, and Western Germany

Differences in Labour Markets Across the Atlantic

Relative Demand and Supply of Skills and Wage Rigidity in the United States, Britain and Western Germany

I extend a two-skill group model by Katz andMurphy (1992) to estimate relative demand and supply for skills as well as wage rigidity in Germany. Using three data sets for Germany, two for Britain and one for the United States, I simulate the change in relative wage rigidity (wage compression) in all three countries during the early and mid 1990s, this being the period when unemployment increased in ...