Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The effects of unemployment and temporary employment on leaving the parental home in Germany

Educational Expansion and its Heterogeneous Returns for Wage Workers

The paper examines the evolution of returns to education in the West German labour market over the last two decades. During this period, graduates from the period of educational expansion in the sixties and seventies entered the labour market and an upgrading of the skill structure took place. In order to tackle the issues of endogeneity of schooling and its heterogeneous returns we apply two estimation ...

The impact of employment transitions on health in Germany. A difference-in-differences propensity score matching approach

This article investigates the effects of transitions between employment and unemployment on health. It also addresses the question of whether or not the widespread use of temporary employment has altered the positive health effects of employment. Drawing on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1995-2010, we apply difference-in-differences propensity score matching to identify the ...

Does Relationship Specific Investment Depend on Asset Ownership? Evidence From a Natural Experiment in the Housing Market

In this paper, I test the most basic prediction of Grossman and Hart (1986, The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration. Journal of Political Economy, 691-719): allocations of asset ownership that expose a party to ex-post expropriation reduce this party’s exante relationship-specific investments. In the empirical context of the German housing market, I find that ...

Measuring the competitive impact of the internet: Evidence from a natural experiment in broadband access

To identify the competitive effect of online competition, I exploit that consumers in some German municipalities lack broadband access due to legacy glass fibre cables. In these areas with reduced online competition, I find that offline employment in electronics retailing grows faster than in the control areas. I find no such differential for food retailing, where there is no online competition. Full ...

Essays in Empirical Health Economics

Economic Incentives and Hospitalization in Germany

International Outsourcing and German Manufacturing Wages

The Impact of International Outsourcing on Individual Employment Security: A Micro-Level Analysis

Perceived Job Insecurity and Well-Being Revisited: Towards Conceptual Clarity

This paper analyzes the impact of job insecurity perceptions on individual well-being. In contrast to previous studies, we explicitly take into account perceptions about both the likelihood and the potential costs of job loss and demonstrate that most contributions to the literature suffer from simultaneity bias. When accounting for simultaneity, we find the true unbiased effect of perceived job insecurity ...