Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Income polarization and economic growth

This study examines empirically the impact of income polarization on economic growth in an unbalanced panel of more than 70 countries during the 1960–2005 period. We calculate various polarization indices using existing micro-level datasets, as well as datasets reconstructed from grouped data on income distribution taken from the World Income Inequality Database. The results garnered for our preferred ...

Utilization and effectiveness of medical rehabilitation among foreign nationals residing in Germany

Human Capital, Values, and Attitudes of Persons Seeking Refuge in Austria in 2015

Since its inception in 2010, the Arab Spring has evolved into a situation of violent conflict in many countries, leading to high levels of migration from the affected region. Given the social impact of the large number of individuals applying for asylum across Europe in 2015, it is important to study who these persons are in terms of their skills, motivations, and intentions. DiPAS (Displaced Persons ...

A Family Affair: Job Loss and the Mental Health of Spouses and Adolescents

This study examines the impact of involuntary job loss on the mental health of family members. Estimates from fixed-effects panel data models, using panel data for Australia, provide little evidence of any negative spillover effect on the mental health of husbands as a result of their wives’ job loss. The mental well-being of wives, however, declines following their husbands’ job loss, but only if ...

Effort and Redistribution: Better Cousins Than One Might Have Thought

We use survey and experimental data to explore how effort choices and preferences for redistribution are linked. Under standard preferences, redistribution would reduce effort. This is different with social preferences. Using data from the World Value Survey, we find that respondents with stronger preferences for redistribution tend to have weaker incentives to engage in effort, but that the reverse ...

Overqualification at the Beginning of a Non Academic Working Career. The Efficiency of the German Dual System under Test

Fixed-term contracts as sorting mechanisms: Evidence from job durations in West Germany

Cohort effects and the returns to education in West Germany

Using a Mincer-type wage function, we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for West German workers born between 1925 and 1974. The main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort, experience, and possibly also age effects in the returns. For women, we find a large and robust decline in schooling premia: in the private sector, the returns to a further ...

Well-being, unemployment, and social interaction: An international comparison

If unemployment is high in an individual's reference group, the moral imperative to work for one's own living may be weakened. Consequently, the psychic costs of unemployment and work incentives are reduced. In this paper, we empirically test this proposition using a survey conducted in almost all European countries. Marginal effects calculated from ordered probit regressions pooled over ...

Gender and Competition

In almost all European Union countries, the gender wage gap is increasing across the wages distribution. In this lecture I briefly survey some recent studies aiming to explain why apparently identical women and men receive such different returns and focus especially on those incorporating pyschological factors as an explanation of the gender gap. Research areas with high potential returns to further ...