Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Transatlantic Differences in Labour Markets: Changes in Wage and Non-Employment Structures in the 1980s and the 1990s

Rising wage inequality in the United States and Britain and rising continental European unemployment have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the unskilled, combined with flexible wages in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but wage rigidities in continental Europe (‘Krugman hypothesis’). This paper tests this hypothesis ...

Switch-On and Switch-Off Effects of Sick Pay Reform on Absence from Work and on Health-Related Outcomes

We evaluate the switch-on and switch-off effects of a natural experiment that reduced sick pay in Germany from 100 to 80% of the wage rate but that effectively only applied to workers without a collective bargaining agreement. Two years following implementation of the reform, a newly elected federal government repealed it. We estimate the reform’s impact on annual days of absence by applying a difference-in-differences ...

Survey item nonresponse and its treatment

Housing wealth or economic climate: Why do house prices matter for well-being?

This study investigates whether and why house prices matter for well-being. House prices may influence well-being via a wealth/access-to-credit mechanism, as a rise in prices increases housing wealth and the collateral value of a house, and via a relative concerns mechanism, if renters compare themselves to homeowners and vice versa. Alternatively, any correlation between house prices and well-being ...

Marginal Taxes: A Good or a Bad for Wages? The Incidence of the Structure of Income and Labor Taxes on Wages

Empirical evidence so far found ambiguous results for the direction of effect of marginal income tax rates on employee remuneration. Based on the GSOEP data from 2002 through 2008 this study analyzes the impact of the marginal tax load on the employee side on the wage rate also allowing average tax rates and employer payroll taxes to play a role. Instrumental variable estimation based on counterfactual ...

Revisiting the neoclassical theory of labour supply - Disutitity of labour, working hours, and happiness

In empirical analyses, employment status has a substantial influence on individual wellbeing. People without work are consistently less happy, even after controlling for income. This result seems to contradict the standard theory assumption of labour disutility. In this paper, we analyze the impact of working time on happiness. The results show distinct positive utility effects caused by employment ...

Labour Supply, Life Satisfaction, and the (Dis)Utility of Work

In economic theory, it is typically assumed that there is a “disutility of labour”. However, empirical research on subjective well-being has consistently shown that unemployed people are less happy than employed people, even after taking income differences into account. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile both findings. We show that happiness and work hours exhibit an inverse U-shaped relation – ...

The Wear and Tear on Health: What Is the Role of Occupation?

Although it seems evident that occupation affects health, effect estimates are scarce. We use a job characteristics matrix linked to German longitudinal data spanning 26 years to characterize occupations by their physical and psychosocial burdens. Employing a dynamic model to control for factors that simultaneously affect health and selection into occupation, we find that manual work and low job control ...

Regional Redistribution: Applying Data from Household Income Data

Public Child Support to Young Adults Living with their Parents - An international Dynamic Comparison