Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Health, aging and retirement in Europe: A cross-country comparison using the CHER data base

Do Marriage and Cohabitation Provide Benefits to Health in Mid-Life? The Role of Childhood Selection Mechanisms and Partnership Characteristics Across Countries

Extensive research has found that marriage provides health benefits to individuals, particularly in the U.S. The rise of cohabitation, however, raises questions about whether simply being in an intimate co-residential partnership conveys the same health benefits as marriage. Here, we use OLS regression to compare differences between partnered and unpartnered, and cohabiting and married individuals ...

Wage changes through job mobility in Europe: A multinomial endogenous switching approach

Inequality in Germany. The Role of Household Context and the Concept of Economic Resources (Dissertation)

Economic inequality has increased considerably in many Western countries and has recently received increasing attention. The gap between rich and poor is now one of the main issues on the policy agendas and is potentially harmful for public welfare when it exceeds a certain threshold. That is why many policy makers are concerned with increasing levels of inequality. Economists should, therefore, provide ...

Beyond Inequality Accounting: Marital Sorting and Couple Labor Supply

This paper examines to what extent non-random sorting of spouses affects earnings inequality while explicitly disentangling effects from increasing assortativeness in couple formation from changing patterns of couples’ labor supply behavior. Using German micro data, earnings distributions of observed and randomly matched couples are compared to each other. Earnings of hypothetical couples are adjusted ...

Marital Sorting, Inequality and the Role of Female Labour Supply: Evidence from East and West Germany

This paper examines the effect of marital sorting on earnings inequality, taking into account extensive and intensive margin labour supply choices. Using German microdata, the observed distribution of couples’ earnings is compared to a counterfactual of random matches. In West Germany, marital sorting is found to be disequalizing only after adjusting for labour supply. This means that positive sorting ...

Shifting Taxes from Labor to Consumption: More Employment and more Inequality

This paper investigates the effect of shifting taxes from labor income to consumption on labor supply and the distribution of income in Germany. We simulate stepwise increases in the value-added tax (VAT) rate, which are compensated by revenue-neutral reductions in income-related taxes. We differentiate between the personal income tax (PIT) and social security contributions (SSC). Based on a dual data ...

Personality Traits Affect Young People's Intention to Study

Although in recent years the number of new students has been growing constantly, socio-economic differences remain an issue in the transition from school to college: those eligible for higher education whose parents do not have a college degree are less likely to take up higher education than their peers from academic parental homes. This means that they may not be fully utilizing their educational ...

Essays on Children's Non-Cognitive Skills and Health (Dissertation)

The effect of involuntary maternal job loss on children's behaviour and non-cognitive skills

This paper uses propensity score methods to analyse the effect of involuntary maternal job loss on children's non-cognitive skills. My analyses are based on a rich and nationwide random sample, the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) that includes information about maternal job loss and child behaviour and non-cognitive skills, in addition to a rich conditioning set. The results show that ...