Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Modelling Heaping Effects in Unemployment Duration Models - With an Application to Retrospective Event Data in the German Socio-Economic Panel

(Why) are immigrants unhappy?

Recent studies suggest that migrants may be less satisfied with their ‘new’ lives than members of the host population and worry that this may be driven by cultural factors, such as feelings of not belonging. Motivated by this concern, this paper analyses the life satisfaction of immigrants once settled in the host country. We rely on the German Socio-Economic Panel’s immigrant sample for the years ...

An Empirical Note on Religiosity and Social Trust using German Survey Data

In this empirical research note, we use a large scale German household survey data set to analyze the correlation between religiosity and social trust. Religiosity takes into account religious affiliations (Catholic, Protestant, other Christian, Muslim/Islam, other religions, none) and the frequency of church attendance. In order to measure social trust, we use three outcome variables (willingness ...

Reservation Wages and the Wage Flexibility Puzzle

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model – even if wages are only occasionally renegotiated. We argue that one source of the wage flexibility puzzles is plausibly the model for the determination of reservation wages, and consider an alternative ...

Home Ownership and Monetary Policy Transmission

We present empirical evidence on the heterogeneity in monetary policy transmission across countries with different home ownership rates. We use household-level data together with shocks to the policy rate identified from high-frequency data. We find that housing tenure reacts more strongly to unexpected changes in the policy rate in Germany and Switzerland - the OECD countries with the lowest home ...

A Study of Employment Careers of Immigrants in Germany

Last Hired, First Fired? The Unemployment Dynamics of Male Immigrants in Germany

Labour market entry, early employment careers, and prospects for further education and training among the low educated youth in Europe

Don´t Worry, Be Happy? Happiness and Reemployment

Subjective well-being is primarily treated as an outcome variable in the economic literature. However, is happiness also a driver of behavior and life’s outcomes? Rich survey data of recent entrants into unemployment in Germany show that a significant inverted U-shaped relationship exists between residual happiness and an unemployed individual’s future reemployment probability and the reentry wage. ...

Empirical Studies of Unemployment: Search Behavior, Reintegration and Prevention (Dissertation)

This dissertation studies the search behavior and future labor market outcomes of the unemployed as well as ways to prevent unemployment, and includes the following questions: How do reservation wages of the unemployed evolve over migrant generations? Do economic preferences play a role when analyzing the reemployment probability of unemployed natives and second generation migrants? Does subjective ...