Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Stability and Change in Risk-Taking Propensity Across the Adult Life Span

Can risk-taking propensity be thought of as a trait that captures individual differences across domains, measures, and time? Studying stability in risk-taking propensities across the life span can help to answer such questions by uncovering parallel, or divergent, trajectories across domains and measures. We contribute to this effort by using data from respondents aged 18 to 85 in the German Socio-Economic ...

Income Distribution and the Business Cycle in Germany: A Semiparametric Approach

The question of how the distribution of income is influenced by the state of the economy is important for understanding the economic mechanisms linking micro- and macro-level variables. There is no generally applicable theory on how the distribution of household incomes is influenced by changed macroeconomic conditions. This paper adapts an empirical approach in order to investigate this relationship ...

A Satisfaction-Driven Poverty Indicator - A Bustle Around the Poverty Line

Poverty line definitions in use often lack a solid scientific foundation. This paper proposes to exploit data on income satisfaction to construct an evidence-based poverty line. The poverty line is identified by using its assumed unique property to explain income dissatisfaction best among all dichotomizations of income. To this end, several model settings are considered including linear and nonlinear ...

Econometric Analyses of Subjective Welfare and Income Inequality (Thesis)

University or job training: Korea and Germany compared

This study is the first to empirically compare the economic returns of human capital in South Korea and Germany. The study, based on the Mincer earnings model (1974), tested whether the wage gap between university graduates and those with lower educational levels is wider in South Korea than in Germany, due to differences in job training. The study estimated the wage gaps by employing random effects ...

Two Aspects of Labor Mobility: A Bivariate Poisson Regression Approach

The study introduces a distinction between two types of labor mobility. Direct job to job changes (which are assumed to be voluntary) and job changes after experiencing an unemployment spell (assumed to be involuntary). Exploiting the close relationship between those two phenomena we adopt a bivariate regression framework for our empirical analysis of data on male individuals in the German labor market. ...

The double role of ethnic heterogeneity in explaining welfare-state generosity

Based on theoretical models of budget-balanced social insurance and individual choice, we argue that in addition to the well-known empathy mechanism whereby ethnic heterogeneity undermines sentiments of solidarity among a citizenry to reduce welfare generosity, population heterogeneity affects the generosity of a polity’s social insurance programs through another distinct mechanism, political conflict. ...

Income Mobility

We survey the literature on income mobility, aiming to provide an integrated discussion of mobility within- and between-generations. We review mobility concepts, descriptive devices, measurement methods, data sources, and recent empirical evidence.

Estimating labour supply elasticities based on cross-country micro data: A bridge between micro and macro estimates?

The Nordic model relies on high tax rates to finance an extensive welfare state. If labour supply elasticities are large, the burden of financing the model can be large even if, arguably, the practice of providing subsidised goods that support labour supply is likely to mitigate these effects. We utilise repeated cross sections of micro data from several countries, including the four major Nordic countries, ...

Modelling the Joint Distribution of Income and Wealth

This paper considers a parametric model for the joint distribution of income and wealth. The model is used to analyze income and wealth inequality in five OECD countries using comparable household-level survey data. We focus on the dependence parameter between the two variables and study whether accounting for wealth and income jointly reveals a different pattern of social inequality than the traditional ...