Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Start-ups by the unemployed: characteristics, survival and direct employment effects

Fostering and supporting start-up businesses by unemployed persons has become an increasingly important issue in many European countries. These new ventures are being subsidized by various governmental programs. Empirical evidence on skillcomposition, direct job creation and other key variables is rather scarce, largely because of inadequate data availability. We base our analysis on unique survey ...

The Gender Wage Gap: Does a Gender Gap in Reservation Wages Play a Part?

This paper focuses on re-examining the gender wage gap and the potential role that reservation wages play. Based on two waves of rich data from the IZA Evaluation Dataset Survey we examine the importance of gender differences in reservation wages to explain the gender gap in realized wages for a sample of newly unemployed individuals actively searching for a full-time job in Germany. The dataset includes ...

The Causal Effects of the Minimum Wage Introduction in Germany: An Overview

In 2015, Germany introduced a statutory hourly minimum wage that was not only universally binding but also set at a relatively high level. We discuss the short-run effects of this new minimum wage on a wide set of socio-economic outcomes, such as employment and working hours, earnings and wage inequality, dependent and selff-employment, as well as reservation wages and satisfaction. We also discuss ...

The Impact of the German Minimum Wage on Individual Wages and Monthly Earnings

This paper evaluates the short-run impact of the introduction of a statutory minimum wage in Germany on the hourly wages and monthly earnings of workers targeted by the reform. We first provide detailed descriptive evidence of changes to the wage structure in particular at the bottom of the distribution and distinguish between trends for regularly employed and marginally employed workers. In the causal ...

The Economic Impact of Social Ties: Evidence from German Reunification

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for noneconomic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who had social ties to East Germany in 1989 experienced a persistent rise in their personal incomes after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the presence of these households ...

Some New Insights on the Interindustry Wage Structure from the Socioeconomic Panel

This paper investigates the interindustry wage structure in the 1985 wave of the German Socioeconomic Panel. In addition to the usual controls, this survey contains detailed information on job characteristics and work conditions. Interaction of industry affiliation is significant with several individual attributes, especially job tenure; homogeneity of earnings equations across these attributes is ...

The Determinants of East-West German Migration: Some First Results

Estimating wage losses of displaced workers in Germany

Getting behind the East-West Wage Differential - Theory and Evidence

No Role for the Hartz Reforms? Demand and Supply Factors in the German Labor Market, 1993-2014

The supply and demand framework of Katz and Murphy (1992) provides new evidence on the source of changes in socially insured full-time and part-time employment in years preceding and following the implementation of the landmark Hartz reforms in Germany. Our findings are consistent with a stable demand for labor, especially in western Germany, implying that supply factors were decisive for the evolution ...