Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Can Low-Wage Employment Help People Escape from the No-Pay – Low-Income Trap?

The experience of unemployment itself increases the risk of staying unemployed, and the unemployed face a high poverty risk. Moreover, experiencing poverty reduces the chances of reemployment. As wage inequality has expanded in recent decades, low-paid employment and in-work poverty have both risen. This study analyzes whether low-pay employment helps people escape the no-pay – low-income trap. Survey ...

On the Location Choice of Newly Arrived Immigrants in Germany

An Econometric Model of the Two-Part Decisionmaking Process in the Demand for Health Care

How the Human Capital Model Explains Why the Gender Wage Gap Narrowed

Development of Wage Inequality for Natives and Immigrants in Germany - Evidence from Quantile Regression and Decomposition

Bequests and labor supply in Germany

Little is known on the effects of inheritances on the working behavior of heirs. Using panel data for Germany, we find behavioral responses that amount up to a 16% reduction in working hours for inheritances of one Mio Euro. For the majority of beneficiaries labor supply effects are, however, modest (owing to small amounts of inherited wealth). These results remain robust if we restrict the sample ...

The Effect of Private Health Insurance on Self-assessed Health Status and Health Satisfaction in Germany

In Germany, private health insurance covers more innovative and costly treatments than public insurance. Moreover, privately insured individuals are treated preferentially by doctors. In this article, I use subjective health data to examine whether these superior features of private insurance actually transfer into better health. I focus on German adolescents who are still in education to control for ...

How Important is the Type of Working Contract for Job Satisfaction of Agency Workers?

Previous research has found that agency workers are less satisfied with their job than regular workers on a permanent contract. All these studies have in common that they treat agency workers as a homogeneous group; that is, they did not consider the contract type agency workers hold. This paper analyzes whether differences in job satisfaction can be explained by the contract type using data from the ...

The (Short-term) Individual Welfare Consequences of an Alcohol Ban

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the (short-term) welfare consequences of an alcohol ban. Using subjective well-being data to proxy individual welfare, I apply a regression discontinuity design where the date of the implementation of the ban in the German federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg functions as discontinuity. I find that the ban reduces life satisfaction of the total population ...

Relative income distribution in six European countries: market and disposable income

The relationship between income inequality and polarization is an empirical fact: a change in equality might occur together with a change in polarization. At the same time, polarization might emerge while inequality remains constant. The outcome of this process entails relevant information about the evolution of the income distribution. We exploit the LIS micro-data to perform a relative distribution ...