Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility (Chapter 16)

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has taken an interesting turn. In addition to focusing on obtaining precise estimates of correlations ...

International Evidence on Well-Being

Imitative Obesity and Relative Utility

If human beings care about their relative weight, a form of imitative obesity can emerge (in which people subconsciously keep up with the weight of the Joneses). Using Eurobarometer data on 29 countries, this paper provides cross-sectional evidence that overweight perceptions and dieting are influenced by a person's relative BMI, and longitudinal evidence from the German Socioeconomic Panel that ...

Rethinking the Relative Income Hypothesis

Income comparisons have been found to be important for individual health. However, the literature has so far looked solely at upward comparisons, disregarding the effects of comparisons with worse-off individuals. In this paper, I use a broad definition of relative income to test simultaneously for the effect of "upward" and "downward" income comparisons on health. Relative deprivation ...

Equal matches are only half the story. Why German female graduates earn 27 % less than males

Germany’s occupational and sectoral change towards a knowledge-based economy calls for high returns on education. Nevertheless, female graduates are paid much less than their male counterparts. We find an overall unadjusted gender pay gap among German graduates of 27 %. This corresponds to an approximate wage gap of 32,5 % thereof 20,3 % account for different endowments and 12,2 % for different remunerations ...

Overeducation among graduates: An overlooked facet of the gender pay gap? Evidence from East and West Germany

Germany’s occupational and sectoral change towards a knowledge‐based economy calls for high returns to education. Nevertheless, female graduates are paid much less than their male counterparts. We wonder whether overeducation affects sexes differently and whether this might answer for part of the gender pay gap. We decompose total year of schooling in years of over- (O), required (R), and undereducation ...

Who is overeducated and why? Probit and dynamic mixed multinomial logit analyses of vertical mismatch in East and West Germany

Overeducation is an often overlooked facet of untapped human resources. But who is overeducated and why? Relying on SOEP data 1984-2011, we use probit models for estimating the likelihood of entering overeducation and dynamic mixed multinomial logit models with random effects addressing state dependence and unobserved heterogeneity. As further robustness checks we use three specifications of the target ...

Remittances and the Brain Drain Revisited: The Microdata Show That More Educated Migrants Remit More

Two of the most salient trends surrounding the issue of migration and development over the last two decades are the large rise in remittances, and an increased flow of skilled migration. However, recent literature based on cross-country regressions has claimed that more educated migrants remit less, leading to concerns that further increases in skilled migration will hamper remittance growth. We revisit ...

Lost in Transition? The Returns to Education Acquired under Communism 15 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Using data for 22 economies in Eastern and Western Europe, we find evidence that having studied under communism is relatively penalized in the economies of the late 2000s. This evidence, however, is limited to males and to primary and secondary education, and holds for eight CEE economies but not for the East Germans who have studied in the former German Democratic Republic. We also find that post-secondary ...

Years of Schooling, Human Capital and the Body Mass Index of European Females

We use the compulsory school reforms implemented in European countries after the II World War to investigate the causal effect of education on the Body Mass Index (BMI) and the incidence of overweight and obesity among European females. Our IV estimates suggest that years of schooling have a protective effect on BMI. The size of the estimated effect is not negligible but smaller than the one found ...