Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Unemployment Benefits and Reservation Wages: Key Elasticities from a Stripped-Down Job Search Approach

This paper exploits survey information on reservation wages and data on actual wages from the European Community Household Panel to deduce, in the manner of Lancaster and Chesher, additional parameters of a stylized structural search model; specifically, reservation wage and transition/duration elasticities. The informational requirements of this approach are minimal, thereby facilitating comparisons ...

Language discrimination in Germany: when evaluation influences objective counting

Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are valued. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation ...

Languages and language policies in Germany / Sprachen und Sprachpolitik in Deutschland

Deutschlands (einzige) nationale Amtssprache ist das Deutsche. Die Dominanz des Deutschen in Schulen, Politik, Rechtswesen, Verwaltung sowie im gesamten (schriftlichen) öffentlichen Leben ist so groß, dass das Fehlen einer kohärenten Sprachpolitik lange Zeit nicht als Problem empfunden wurde. Die staatliche Zurückhaltung in diesem Bereich hat einerseits historische Gründe; sie wurde andererseits durch ...

Factor Shares and Income Inequality - Empirical Evidence from Germany 2002-2008

We examine the interplay between changes in the functional distribution of income and the distribution of market income among households. We use micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel as well as macro data from the German Federal Statistical Office from 2002 to 2008. We categorize and evaluate the implications of changes in the functional distribution of income upon the distribution of income ...

Child-Free and Unmarried: Changes in the Life Planning of Young East German Women

Evaluating Patterns of Income Growth when Status Matters: A Robust Approach

This paper addresses the problem of ranking growth episodes from a microeconomic perspective. While most of the existing criteria, framed in the pro-poor growth tradition, are either based on anonymous individuals or are used to identify them on the basis of their status in the initial period, this paper proposes new criteria to evaluate growth, which are robust to the choice of the reference period ...

Co-Pay and Feel Okay: Self-Rated Health Status After a Health Insurance Reform

The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. Among others, the reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for prescription drugs. This natural experiment allows identification of the causal impact of the program on self-assessed ...

Financing On-The-Job Training - Shared Investment or Promotion Based System? Evidence from Germany

Documentation of Sample Sizes and Panel Attrition in the German Socio Economic Panel (GSOEP) (1984 until 1996)

Documentation of Sample Sizes and Panel Attrition in the German Socio Economic Panel (GSOEP) (1984 until 1997)

The sample sizes of the English public use version of the GSOEP and the German DIW version differ by approximately five percent. The exclusion of 5 percent of the original data from the GSOEP was necessary to fulfill the requirements of the German data protection laws. Technically, this was done by dropping randomly 5 percent of the original wave 1 households. All persons and households which stem ...