Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

International migration, ethnicity, and economic inequality

Employment Protection Reforms, Employment and the Incidence of Temporary Jobs in Europe: 1995-2001

The Structure of the Permanent Job Wage Premium: Evidence from Europe

Using longitudinal data on individuals from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for thirteen countries during 1995-2001, I investigate the wage premium for permanent jobs relative to temporary jobs. The countries are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. I find that among men the wage premium ...

Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being

People do not adapt to income changes: A re-evaluation of the dynamic effects of (reference) income on life satisfaction with GSOEP and UKHLS data

Do people adapt to changes in income? This paper shows that there is no evidence of adaptation to income in GSOEP (1984-2015) and UKHLS (1996-2015) data. Following the empirical approach of Vendrik (2013), I arrive at this surprising answer by estimating (dynamic) life satisfaction equations, in which I simultaneously enter contemporaneous and lagged terms for a respondent’s own household income and ...

Triggers and determinants of severe household indebtedness in Germany

The phenomenon of overindebted private households has created economic and political concern, also in Germany. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence level, this paper investigates the question whether severe household indebtedness is mainly driven by trigger events such as unemployment, childbirth, divorce, ...

Who feels constrained by high debt burdens? Subjective vs. objective measures of household debt

This paper analyzes differences in self-assessed debt burdens of German households confronted with an objective debt burden. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, my econometric analysis shows that a household's subjective debt burden is not only influenced by the current constellation of income, debt service and, possibly, the potential subsistence level, but also by expectations of ...

Broke, Ill, and Obese: Is There an Effect of Household Debt on Health?

We analyze the association between household indebtedness and different health outcomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1999 to 2009. We control for unobserved heterogeneity by applying fixed-effects methods and furthermore use a subsample of constantly employed individuals plus lagged debt variables to reduce problems of reverse causality. We apply different measures of household ...

Combining employment and care-giving: how differing care intensities influence employment patterns among middle-aged women in Germany

Given an ageing population and increased participation by women in the labour force, the relationship between unpaid care and the availability of women to the labour force is gaining in importance as an issue. This article assesses the impact of unpaid care on transitions into employment by women aged between 45 and 59 years. It uses the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) from the years 2001–2014 to ...

Is Part-Time Employment after Childbirth a Stepping-Stone into Full-Time Work? A Cohort Study for East and West Germany

Does part-time work support first-time mothers? employment by providing a stepping-stone into full-time work in Germany? Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984?2012, this study compares three different age cohorts of first-time East and West German mothers to investigate whether there has been any convergence between East and West Germany in the way women use part-time employment. ...