Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Returns to Regional Migration: Causal Effect or Selection on Wage Growth?

At the interface of economy, geography and sociology the presentation deals with wage effects of geographic mobility. Investigating pecuniary returns to geographic mobility, researchers have to tackle the problem that migrants assess greater innate ability and motivation. Empirical studies show that migrants are favorably self-selected with respect to human capital characteristics. To get rid of potential ...

Social Inequality, Child Care Attendance and School Start in Germany

This study investigates how far attending child care institutions can reduce delayed school entries in Germany. The influence of child care institutions should be stronger when children attend them at younger ages, and it should vary according to the children's social origins. When parents' cultural resources are low, care institutions should have large additional positive effects on children's ...

Employment Effects of Publicly Financed Training Programs - The East German Experience

Modelling Heaping Effects in Unemployment Duration Models - With an Application to Retrospective Event Data in the German Socio-Economic Panel

Don´t Worry, Be Happy? Happiness and Reemployment

Subjective well-being is primarily treated as an outcome variable in the economic literature. However, is happiness also a driver of behavior and life’s outcomes? Rich survey data of recent entrants into unemployment in Germany show that a significant inverted U-shaped relationship exists between residual happiness and an unemployed individual’s future reemployment probability and the reentry wage. ...

Empirical Studies of Unemployment: Search Behavior, Reintegration and Prevention (Dissertation)

This dissertation studies the search behavior and future labor market outcomes of the unemployed as well as ways to prevent unemployment, and includes the following questions: How do reservation wages of the unemployed evolve over migrant generations? Do economic preferences play a role when analyzing the reemployment probability of unemployed natives and second generation migrants? Does subjective ...

Happiness and Work

The relationship between happiness and work is subject to an ever growing empirical literature in economics. The analyses are mostly based on large-scale survey data to measure subjective well-being. Whereas one large strand of research investigates the effect of job loss and becoming unemployed, another field of study focuses on the determinants of job satisfaction evolving around employment conditions, ...

Causes and Trends of the Digital Divide

The Formation of Prosociality: Causal Evidence on the Role of Social Environment

This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that socio-economic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child interaction and mothers’ prosocial attitudes are systematically related to elementary school children’s prosociality. In a second step, we present evidence on a randomly assigned variation ...

Impatience among Preschool Children and their Mothers

Using experimental data of children and their mothers, this paper explores the intergenerational relationship of impatience. The child’s impatience stems from a delay of gratification experiment. Mother’s impatience has been assessed by a choice task where the mothers faced trade-offs between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later monetary reward with a delay of six or twelve months. The findings demonstrate ...