Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

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 ...

The bigger the children, the bigger the worries – Are preschoolers and adolescents affected differently by family instability with regard to non-cognitive skills?

Substantial research on the relationship between family structures and child outcomes represents a considerable part of the literature. However, family structure provides a rather static view of the relationship of children’s living arrangements and their well-being, revealing hardly anything about the stability of a family for a longer period. This paper focuses on the impact of family instability ...

Family Instability and Locus of Control in Adolescence

Investigating the impact of family instability is important as more and more children experience different family changes in many industrialized countries. In this paper we examine the dynamics of family structure, looking at the potential effect of yearly maternal partnership transitions on adolescents’ locus of control. We aim at combining research on family instability with research on non-cognitive ...

Earnings Inequality

Inequality has increased considerably in many Western countries over the past decades. When dealing with economic inequality as a research subject the question "inequality of what among whom" arises. Analyses of inequality are typically concerned with the distribution of wages, earnings or income and have been performed by different strands in the literature, mainly in public and in labor ...

Does Size Matter? The Impact of Changes in Household Structure on Income Distribution in Germany

Income inequality in Germany has been continually increasing during the past 20 years. One cause of this development, among others, could be structural shifts in household formation due to long-term societal trends. These affect per capita incomes, which has repercussions for the income distribution even if wages remain constant. The aim of this paper is to quantify the proportion of changing household ...