Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Beans for Breakfast? How Exportable Is the British Workfare Model?

Social assistance and inactivity traps have long been considered as one of the main causes of the poor employment performance of EU countries. The success of New Labour in the UK has triggered a growing interests in instruments capable of combining the promotion of responsibility and self-sufficiency with solidarity with less skilled workers. Making-work-pay (MWP) policies, consisting of transfers ...

Labor Supply Elasticities in Europe and the US

Despite numerous studies on labor supply, the size of elasticities is rarely comparable across countries. In this paper, we suggest the first large-scale international comparison of elasticities, while netting out possible differences due to methods, data selection and the period of investigation. We rely on comparable data for 17 European countries and the US, a common empirical approach and a complete ...

Comparing Labor Supply Elasticities in Europe and the United States: New Results

We suggest the first large-scale international comparison of labor supply elasticities for 17 European countries and the US, separately by gender and marital status. Measurement differences are netted out by using a harmonized empirical approach and comparable data sources. We find that own-wage elasticities are relatively small and much more uniform across countries than previously thought. Differences ...

Steady-State Labor Supply Elasticities: A Survey

Previous reviews of static labor supply estimations concentrate mainly on the evidence from the 1980s and 1990s, Anglo-Saxon countries and early generations of labor supply modeling. This paper provides a fresh characterization of steady-state labor supply elasticities for Western Europe and the US. We also investigate the relative contribution of different methodological choices in explaining the ...

Own-wage labor supply elasticities: variation across time and estimation methods

There is a huge variation in the size of labor supply elasticities in the literature, which hampers policy analysis. While recent studies show that preference heterogeneity across countries explains little of this variation, we focus on two other important features: observation period and estimation method. We start with a thorough survey of existing evidence for both Western Europe and the USA, over ...

A Note on Absenteeismus and Firm Size. Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel

Worker Absenteeism: Why Firm Size May Matter

Who Identifies with the AfD? Explorative Analyses in Longitudinal Perspective

Recently, international scholars found two factors that account for partisanship with right-wing populist parties: feelings of economic insecurity and perceived cultural threat. When explaining increasing partisanship with the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD), the first successful right-wing populist party on the state level in Germany, results remain somewhat unclear, especially ...

Redistribution and insurance in the German welfare state

Welfare states redistribute both between individuals reducing annual inequality and over the life-cycle insuring against income risks. But studies measuring redistribution often focus only on a one-year period. Using German SOEP data from 1984 to 2009, long-term inequality over a 20-year period is computed and then decomposed into an inter- and intra-individual component. Results show that annual inequality ...

Long-term Participation Tax Rates

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to reduce work incentives for the lowskilled and to increase durations of unemployment. Standard studies measure work incentives based on annual income concepts. This paper analyzes work incentives inherent in the German tax-benefit system when extending the time horizon to three years (long-term). Participation ...