Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Does education reduce wage inequality? Quantile regression evidence from 16 countries

The Welfare State and Anti-Poverty Policy in Rich Countries

This paper is prepared as a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution, Volume 2 (edited by A. B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Elsevier-North Holland, forthcoming). Like the other chapters in the volume (and its predecessor), the aim is to provide a comprehensive review of a particular area of research. The aim of this chapter is to highlight some key aspects of recent economic research on the ...

The paradox of redistribution revisited: and that it may rest in peace?

There is a long-standing controversy over the question of whether targeting social transfers towards the bottom part of the income distribution actually enhances or weakens their redistributive impact. Korpi and Palme have influentially claimed that “the more we target benefits at the poor, the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality”. The basic empirical underpinning of this claim is a ...

The Unequal Incidence of Non-Standard Employment across Occupational Groups: An Empirical Analysis of Post-Industrial Labour Markets in Germany and Europe

The paper addresses an often neglected question in labour market research: to which extent do outcomes aggregated on the national level disguise occupational diversity in employment conditions? In particular, how and why do occupational groups differ with regard to the incidence of non-standard employment? To explore these questions, the paper derives a detailed occupational scheme from the literature, ...

Immigrants between labour market and poverty

Child Care Center Quality: Measurement Issues and Links to Child Developmental Outcomes

Dual Embeddedness: Informal Job Matching and Labor Market Institutions in the United States and Germany

Drawing on the embeddedness, varieties of capitalism and macrosociological life course perspectives, we examine how institutional arrangements affect network-based job finding behaviors in the United States and Germany. Analysis of cross-national survey data reveals that informal job matching is highly clustered among specific types of individuals and firms in the United States, whereas it is more ...

Search, Effort, and Locus of Control

We test the hypothesis that locus of control - one’s perception of control over events in life - influences search by affecting beliefs about the efficacy of search effort in a laboratory experiment. We find that reservation offers and effort are increasing in the belief that one’s efforts influence outcomes when subjects exert effort without knowing how effort influences the generation of offers but ...

Who benefits? A Comparison of Welfare and Outcomes for the Unemployed in Britain and Germany (Dissertation)

How do different welfare states respond to the challenge of unemployment? Comparing Britain and Germany in the 1990s, the main focus of this thesis is on how welfare policies affect outcomes for individuals unemployed persons. The interaction of the state, labour markets and household structures is considered crucial in understanding these outcomes. The selection of countries – Britain and Germany ...

Dealing with negative marginal utilities in the discrete choice modelling of labour supply

In discrete choice labor supply analysis, it is often reasonably expected that utility will increase with income. Yet, analyses based on discrete choice models sometimes mention that, when no restriction is imposed a priori in the optimization program, the monotonicity condition is not fully satisfied ex post. In order to overcome this limitation, some authors impose restrictions that may appear to ...