Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Work and Family: Marriage, Children, Child gender and the Work Hours and Earnings of West German Men

Sons, daughters, wives, and the labour market outcomes of West German men

Explaining Import Variety and Quality: The Role of the Income Distribution

In this paper we examine whether a generalized version of Flam and Helpman’s (1987) model of vertical differentiation can reconcile three facts. One, countries import only a subset of available varieties. Two, import prices vary across exporters within narrow product categories. Three, US growth in both import variety and import price dispersion has occurred at the same time that the US income distribution ...

Earnings Inequality in Europe: Structure and Patterns of Inter-Temporal Changes

The Determinants of Reservation Wages in Germany: Does a Motivation Gap Exist?

This paper investigates the reservation wages of unemployed persons on the basis of a job-search model with non-static reservation wages using panel data from Germany from 1987 to 1998. The results suggest that reservation wages are relatively high in Germany compared to other countries. Furthermore, pooled regression results show that most recent wages and personal characteristics of the unemployed ...

Reservation Wages, Offered Wages, and Unemployment Duration - New Empirical Evidence

No Benefits of Seeing a Dark Future? A Note on Recent Findings on the Effects of Forecasting Life Satisfaction

In the recent article (Lang et al., 2013), the authors explore functional outcomes of life satisfaction with regard to hazards of mortality using the adult life span sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The results suggest that “being overly optimistic predicting a better future than actually observed was associated with […] a great risk of mortality within the following decade”. ...

The Effects of Elite Sports on Later Job Success

This paper analyses the income effect of the participation in elite sports. To quantify the average difference in the monthly net income of former elite athletes and non-athletes we estimate sample average treatment effect scores (SATT) by using covariate nearest-neighbour matching (CVM). While our treatment group consists of formerly funded top-level athletes, the control group of non-athletes is ...

Remarriage as a Way to Overcome the Financial Consequences of Divorce—A Test of the Economic Need Hypothesis for European Women

In this article, we investigate to what extent remarriage functions as a strategy to overcome post-divorce financial distress, and whether this varies across welfare states. To this end, we estimate the impact of divorced women's income (changes) on repartnering and vice versa, using longitudinal data from the European Community Household Panel for 11 Member States. Our analyses provide support ...

Happiness Adaptation to Income and to Status in an Individual Panel

We study adaptation to income and to status using individual panel data on the happiness of 7812 people living in Germany from 1984 to 2000. Specifically, we estimate a “happiness equation” defined over several lags of income and status and compare the long-run effects. We can (cannot) reject the hypothesis of no adaptation to income (status) during the four years following an income (status) change. ...