Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Work-Family Policies and the Effects of Children on Women's Employment and Earnings

Reconciliation Policies and the Effects of Motherhood on Employment, Earnings, and Poverty

Job strain and long-term sickness absence from work - a ten-year prospective study in German working population

Objective: To examine the prospective associations between baseline job strain and ten-year cumulative incidence of long term sickness absence (LTSA) in the German workforce. Methods: This study used longitudinal data from the 2001-2010 waves of The German Socio Economic Panel (SOEP) (n = 9794). Kaplan-Meier survival curves and Cox proportional hazard regression models were used to examine the prospective ...

Wages and Ageing: Is There Evidence for the "Inverse-U" Profile?

How individual wages change with time is one of the crucial determinants of labour market decisions including the timing of retirement. The focus of this paper is the relationship between age and wages with special attention given to individuals nearing retirement. The analysis is presented in a comparative context for Britain and Germany looking at two longitudinal data sets (BHPS and SOEP, respectively) ...

Dynamics of Earnings and Hourly Wages in Germany

There is by now a vast number of studies which document a sharp increase in crosssectional wage inequality during the 2000s. It is often assumed that this inequality is of a “permanent nature” which in turn is used as an argument calling for government intervention. We examine these claims using a fully balanced panel of full-time employed individuals in Germany from the German Socio-Economic Panel ...

Dynamics in transitory and permanent variation of wages in Germany

We employ covariance structure models to decompose the cross-sectional variance of male wages in Germany into its permanent and transitory parts. We find that the steep growth of cross-sectional inequality during the early 2000s is predominantly driven by transitory factors.

Tangible Temptation in the Social Dilemma: Cash, cooperation, and self-control

The social dilemma may contain, within the individual, a self-control conflict between urges to act selfishly and better judgment to cooperate. Examining the argument from the perspective of temptation, we pair the public good game with treatments that vary the degree to which money is abstract (merely numbers on-screen) or tangible (tokens or cash). We also include psychometric measures of self-control ...

Happiness: Before and After the Kids

Understanding how having children influences parents’ subjective well-being (“happiness”) has great potential to explain fertility behavior. We study parental happiness trajectories before and after the birth of a child, using large British and German longitudinal data sets. We account for unobserved parental characteristics using fixed-effects models and study how sociodemographic factors modify the ...

Income Inequalities within Couples in the Czech Republic and European Countries

This study analyses the income distribution within couples in the Czech Republic and ten European countries using the EU-SILC 2005 database. Data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database supplement the analysis with previous period (1986–2000). Women, on average, contribute less to a couple‘s income than men. Among the included countries, within-couple income inequality tends to be lower in ...

Automatic Stabilizers and Economic Crisis: United States vs. Europe