Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Comparing Income Mobility in Germany and the United States Using Generalized Entropy Mobility Measures

Fiscal Stabilisers in Europe: The Macroeconomic Impact of Tax and Benefit Systems

Quantiles for Counts

This article studies the estimation of conditional quantiles of counts. Given the discreteness of the data, some smoothness must be artificially imposed on the problem. We show that it is possible to smooth the data in a way that allows inference to be performed using standard quantile regression techniques. The performance and implementation of the estimators are illustrated by simulations and an ...

A Note on Inequality Aversion Across Countries, Using Two New Measures

Studies using the Gini Index as a measure of income inequality have consistently found a positive and significant effect of the Gini on both happiness and life satisfaction. Two new measures used here – the ratio of persons in the lowest income decile relative to the number in the highest, and the ratio of the number in the lowest social class relative to the number in the highest, in a given country ...

Are Regional Differences in Utility Eliminated over Time? Evidence from Germany

Hedonic theory assumes that changes in land prices and wage rates eliminate the utility advantages of differing locations. Using happiness data from the German socio-economic panel this paper empirically tests whether regional utility differences exist and if so whether utility levels show any tendency to converge over time. Empirical analysis reveals substantial differences in utility over different ...

Intergenerational transmission of unemployment - evidence for German sons

This paper studies the association between the unemployment experience of fathers and their sons. Based on German survey data that cover the last decades we find significant positive correlations. Using instrumental variables estimation and the Gottschalk (1996) method we investigate to what extent fathers' unemployment is causal for offsprings' employment outcomes. In agreement with most ...

Rebound Effects in German Residential Heating: Do Ownership and Income Matter?

In this paper, by using panel data and a fixed effects model, we estimate the direct rebound effect related to space heating in German residential households. The data used are from a representative repeated survey among some 11,000 households in Germany provided by the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin). We find that for the size of the direct rebound effect, i.e. the amount of energy ...

Number of Siblings and Educational Choices of Immigrant Children: Evidence from First- and Second-Generation Immigrants

We document the educational integration of immigrant children in France and Germany with a focus on the link between family size and educational decisions and distinguishing particularly between first- and second-generation immigrants and between source country groups. First, for immigrant adolescents, we show family-size adjusted convergence to almost native levels of higher education track attendance ...

Lifestyles - a relevant segmentation tool for the analysis of the socio-residential organisation?

Do welfare and labour market institutions influence unemployment duration of immigrants? Evidence from 11 European countries

This paper investigates the effect of institutions on the unemployment gap between immigrants and natives in 11 EU-countries. We study whether benefits provide disincentive effects as the job-search theory suggests or rather efficiency gains as alternative theories propose. Further than the existing literature, we study unemployment duration instead of unemployment incidence, we distinguish between ...