Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

New Modes, New Challenges? The Influence of Extended Working Lives on the Late Employment Phase in Germany

In the past decade, old age security policies have aimed at providing incentives to prolong employment and change eligibility rules to reduce early retirement options; these are known as Active Ageing measures. Research reveals that extended working lives have altered exit patterns towards a prolongation of the late employment phase. This paper draws on conditions in the organisation of work in the ...

Government Report on Wellbeing in Germany

With its “Wellbeing in Germany – what matters to us” initiative, the federal government is turning its attention to the issue of wellbeing. It is designed to provide a benchmark for effective policymaking. But how do people define “wellbeing”? The government initiated a national dialogue to find the answer to this question. It revealed that people have a very broad and diverse view of what constitutes ...

OECD Early Childhood Policy Review 2002-2004. Background Report Germany (Chapter 10.2 u. 13)

Changes in Occupational Tasks and Their Association with Individual Wages and Occupational Mobility

This study provides novel evidence on the relevance of task content changes between and within occupations to wage dynamics of occupational changers and stayers. I use individual‐level, cross‐sectional data featuring tasks performed on the job to compute a measure of proximity of job contents. Then, I merge this measure to a large‐scale panel survey to show that occupational changers experience a wage ...

Great Expectations: Reservation Wages and the Minimum Wage Reform

This paper is the first causal study using quasi-experimental methods to identify the effect of minimum wages on the reservation wages of non-workers. We exploit variation in regional exposure to the introduction of a high-impact minimum wage in Germany in 2015, combined with survey responses about wage acceptance thresholds of job seekers. Results show a 16% increase in reservation wages among non-employed ...

Gender Quotas in the Boardroom: New Evidence from Germany

We examine the introduction of a gender quota law in Germany, mandating a minimum 30% of the underrepresented gender on the supervisory boards of a particular type of firms. We exploit the fact that Germany has a two-tier corporate system consisting of the affected supervisory boards and unaffected management boards within the same firm. We find a positive effect on the female share on supervisory ...

Minimum Wage: Many Entitled Employees in Germany Still Do Not Receive It

There has been a universal statutory minimum wage in Germany for a good four years, but many employees still do not receive it. This is the finding of new calculations based on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which have updated noncompliance with the minimum wage for 2017. Even conservative calculations indicate that around 1.3 million people who are entitled to the minimum wage receive a lower wage ...

Job Matching in Connected Regional and Occupational Labour Markets

Job mobility equilibrates disparities in local labour markets and influences the job-matching efficiency. We specify a matching function with regional, occupational and combined regional–occupational spillovers of unemployed and vacancies. To construct these spillovers, we use information on regional proximities and occupational similarities. Based on novel German data on new hires, the unemployed ...

Economic Aspects of Subjective Attitudes towards the German Minimum Wage Reform

Despite some skepticism among experts about the effects of a minimum wage, there is remarkably widespread public support for such policies. Using representative survey data from 2015 and 2016, we investigate the subjective attitudes driving public support for Germany’s recent minimum wage reform. We find that socio-economic characteristics and political orientations explain a minor part of the variation ...

A Tale of Two Countries - A Comparison of Unemployment Spells in the United Kingdom and Germany