Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Is There a Class Ceiling over Europe? Exploring the Gender Pay Gap across the Wages Distribution

Copayments in the German Health System - Do They Work?

The Effect of Self-assessed Job Security on the Demand for Medical Rehab

The interdependence of labor market conditions and the demand for health care has been addressed by several theoretical and empirical analyses. We contribute to the debate by empirically examining the effect of a decrease in self-perceived job security on health care utilization. That is, employees at risk of losing their job might postpone or even try not to use non-acute rehab measures in order to ...

Less social health insurance, more private supplementary insurance? Empirical evidence from Germany

Based on individual level data from Germany, we analyze the effect of changes in the compulsory benefit package of the social health insurance on the demand for supplementary private insurance, employing a difference-in-differences approach. The focus is on the exclusion of dental prostheses from the benefit package in 1997 and its re-inclusion in 1999. Individuals born prior to 1979 serve as control ...

The Case of Germany

Technical Change, Inequality and the Polarization of Work: A Structured Review of Concepts and New Evidence for Germany, 1984-2003 (Master thesis)

Why Should Women Get Less? Evidence on the Gender Pay Gap from Multifactorial Survey Experiments

Gender pay gaps likely persist in Western societies because both men and women consider somewhat lower earnings for female employees than for otherwise similar male employees to be fair. Two different theoretical approaches explain “legitimate” wage gaps: same-gender referent theory and reward expectations theory. The first approach states that women compare their lower earnings primarily with that ...

Long-term evidence of retrospective voting: A natural experiment from the German Democratic Republic

The paper investigates long-lasting electoral punishment. Decades of communist socialization and the repressive rule of a single-party have left their left-wing fingerprint on East Germany. In this paper we show that voters act rationally: given negative life circumstances experienced under the rule of the communist party, they display retrospective voting even decades later. Our insight is based on ...

No Claim, No Pain: Measuring the Non-Take-up of Social Assistance Using Register Data

The main objectives of social assistance benefits, including poverty alleviation and labor-market or social reintegration, can be seriously compromised if support is difficult to access. While recent studies point to high non-take-up rates, existing evidence does not make full use of the information recorded by benefit agencies. Most studies have to rely on interview-based data, with misreporting and ...

In-work policies in Europe: killing two birds with one stone?