Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Returns to Type or Tenure?

A regression of wages on firm tenure is likely to yield biased estimates of the returns to tenure because tenure and wages are confounded by unobserved attributes of the job and the unobserved quality of the match between the firm and the employee. Previously, the within-job variation in tenure has been used as an instrument to estimate the average returns to tenure. In this paper, we propose to use ...

Comparing the Predictive Power of Subjective and Objective Health Indicators: Changes in Hand Grip Strength and Overall Satisfaction with Life as Predictors of Mortality

Self-reported measures of health are generally treated as weak measures of respondents’ objective health status. On the other hand, most surveys use self-reported health to measure health status and to determine the effects of a range of other socio-economic characteristics of the local environment on individual health. It is therefore of interest to the public health research community to verify the ...

The German Minimum Wage: Experiences and Perspectives After One Year

Since 1 January 2015 a statutory minimum wage of € 8.50 per hour applies in Germany. In 2014 between 4.8 and 5.4 million employees still earned a lower hourly wage. Even if it cannot yet be stated exactly how many employees benefitted from the introduction of the minimum wage, above-average wage increases in the classical low-wage sectors indicate significant effects of the introduction of the ...

Education and Wage Inequality in Germany - A Review of the Empirical Literature

Educational Attainment and Returns to Education in Germany - An Analysis by Subject of Degree, Gender and Region

Gender Effects as Macro-Level Effects: Germany and the United States 1991-1997

My research examines within-nation differences as well as cross-national differences in socially stratified outcomes, specifically the distribution of household incomes. I build on the considerable empirical evidence suggesting that group memberships are important factors in shaping one's life course and in determining the level of social inequality. I examine seven years of longitudinal data ...

Two Approaches to Understanding Control of Voluntary and Involuntary Job Shifts among Germans and Foreigners from 1991 to 1996

German Active Labor Market Policies: The Use of Job Creation and Training Programs Following Unification

The Development and Happiness of Very Young Children

The paper demonstrates how Sen’s (1985) alternative approach to welfare economics can be used to shed light on the wellbeing of very young children. More specifically, we estimate versions of the three key relations from his framework using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, 2012) Survey. Our primary models provide evidence that skills are related to involvement in cognate activities ...

Are Immigrants Paid Less for Education?

This paper is on measuring the gap in returns to education between foreign-born and native workers in France, Germany, and Austria and investigates the extent to which this gap can be explained by a mis-match between the actual and the years of schooling typical for a given occupation. The return to usual years of schooling across different occupations is found to be higher than that for actual years ...