Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Which Feeling is Stronger: Jealousy or Laziness?

Why Has Income Inequality in Germany Increased from 2002 to 2011? A Behavioral Microsimulation Decomposition

This paper proposes a method to decompose changes in income inequality into the contributions of policy changes, wage rate changes, and population changes while considering labor supply reactions. Using data from the Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP), this method is applied to decompose the increase in income inequality in Germany from 2002 to 2011, a period that saw tax reductions and a controversial overhaul ...

Optimal taxation under different concepts of justness

A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile this puzzle by generalizing the optimal taxation framework by Saez (2002) to allow for alternatives to welfarism. ...

How Risk Averse and how Prudent are Workers?

Analogous to the widely studied concept of precautionary savings, our study contributes to the burgeoning literature on precautionary labor supply behavior when wages are subject to uninsurable wage risk. We estimate the parameters of a dynamic structural model of labor supply of men. We test whether workers are risk averse and prudent in the sense that they increase labor supply in anticipation of ...

How Important is Precautionary Labor Supply?

We quantify the importance of precautionary labour supply defined as the difference between hours supplied in the presence of risk and hours under perfect foresight. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2001 to 2012, we estimate the effect of wage risk on labour supply and test for constrained adjustment of labour supply. We find that married men choose on average about 2.8% of their hours of ...

Getting the Poor to Work: Three Welfare Increasing Reforms for a Busy Germany

We study three budget-neutral reforms of the German tax and transfer system designed to improve work incentives for people with low incomes: a feasible flat tax reform that provides a basic income which is equal to the current level of the means tested unemployment benefit, and two alternative reforms that involve employment subsidies to stimulate participation and full-time work, respectively. We ...

The Regional Dynamics of European Electoral Politics: Participation in National and European Contests in the 1990s

Subnational Analyses Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Data Archive

Comparing Government Redistribution across Countries: The Problem of Second-order Effects

The traditional way of measuring government redistribution across countries is to compare the income households report that they receive from private sources with the income they receive after government transfers have been added and taxes and social insurance contributions deducted. Unfortunately, this conventional measure does not capture “second order” effects whereby income guarantees arising from ...

The Conditional Effects of Income Inequality on Extreme Right Wing Votes: A Subnational Analysis of Western Europe in the 1990's