Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Changes in Job Stability: Evidence from Lifetime Job Histories

We use lifetime job histories from the pension records to evaluate changes in job stability in Finland between 1963 and 2004. We specify a duration model and estimate the effects of elapsed duration, age, and calendar time on the hazard of job ending using individual-level panel data spanning over four decades. We find that this hazard increased during the recession years in the early 1990s but has ...

Dependent Self-Employment as a Way to Evade Employment Protection Legislation

This paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self-employment, while making transitions to independent selfemployment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried work and selfemployment in favour of the former. In conducting this analysis, discrete ...

Unemployment and Health: An Analysis by Means of Better Data and Improved Methodology (Dissertation)

Intergenerational Relationships

Intergenerational relationships within family and kinship structures have become a salient issue in scientific research. The major reasons for this are the intense demographic changes that occurred throughout the twentieth century, such as an increased life expectancy in combination with decreased fertility, and the implications of this for the major institutions of the social welfare state. This has ...

Technological Innovation and Inclusive Growth in Germany

Technological innovation has historically contributed to inclusive economic growth in Germany. In more recent decades, however, this contribution has weakened due to the declining impact of technological innovation on labor productivity growth. Fearing that this declining impact would undermine the international competitiveness of the economy, real labor compensation was progressively curbed since ...

The Effect of Leisure Activities on Life Satisfaction: The Importance of Holiday Trips

Does active leisure make life more satisfying? If so, what kind of leisure activity is the greatest contributor to happiness? These questions are answered by means of data from four waves of a large-scale continuous study of the general public in Germany. Cross-sectional analysis does not show much of a relationship between happiness and last year’s leisure activities, with the exception of holiday ...

Intergenerational Transmission of Risk Attitudes − A Revealed Preference Approach

This study investigates whether children and parents show a similar willingness to take risk in their choice of occupation. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we calculate the occupational variation in earnings unexplained by human capital differences to obtain a measure of occupational risk. We find that fathers' earnings risk is significantly positively related to sons' earnings ...

Politics and parents - Intergenerational transmission of values after a regime shift

Exploiting the "natural experiment" of German reunification, we study whether socialism has an enduring effect on people's basic values. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that individuals that lived in the German Democratic Republic assign different importance to six out of nine values. The first subsequent generation differs in a similar way from their West German ...

Dynastic Inequality Compared: Multigenerational Mobility in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany

Using harmonized household survey data, we analyse long run social mobility in the US, the UK, and Germany and test recent theories of multigenerational persistence of socio-economic status. In this country comparison setting we find evidence against Gregory Clark’s “universal law of social mobility”. In general, our results show that the long run persistence of socio-economic status tends to vary ...

Socioeconomic situation and health outcomes of single parents