Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Leisure Behavior of Young People: Education-Oriented Activities Becoming Increasingly Prevalent

Young people’s leisure activities are significantly different today than they were ten years ago. The obvious use of communication and entertainment electronics, such as cell phones, computers, and games consoles is only one aspect—there are also less visible changes: informal activities such as meeting with friends are being increasingly sidelined by education-oriented activities like extra-curricular ...

How learning a musical instrument affects the development of skills

Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the effects of extracurricular music activities on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality, time use and ambition using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Our findings suggest that adolescents ...

More and More Students, Especially Those from Middle-Income Households, Are Using Private Tutoring

Private tutoring is playing an increasingly significant role in the education of many teenagers and children: In 2013, a total of 18 percent of students at the secondary level (approximately ages 10–17) worked with paid tutors; among students at the primary level (approximately ages 6–10), this figure stood at six percent. In the period between 2009 and 2013, an average of 47 percent of 17-year-old ...

Institute for the Study of Labor - IZA Highlights 1998-2008

Does the Calculation Hold? The Fiscal Balance of Migration to Denmark and Germany

Calculating the net fiscal effects of immigration not just for a fiscal year but over the lifespan of immigrant cohorts accentuates the assets and deficits in migration and integration policies and their long-term potential. The less national policies concentrate on a labor migrant selection process according to economic criteria, the higher the risk of generating economic losses or only a reduced ...

Geographically Referenced Data in Social Science - A service paper for SOEP data users

Do Employers Have More Monopsony Power in Slack Labor Markets?

This article confronts monopsony theory’s predictions regarding workers’ wages with observed wage patterns over the business cycle. Using German administrative data for the years 1985 to 2010 and an estimation framework based on duration models, the authors construct a time series of the labor supply elasticity to the firm and estimate its relationship to the unemployment rate. They find that firms ...

Women Move Differently: Job Separations and Gender

Using a large German linked employer-employee data set and methods of competing risks analysis, this paper investigates gender differences in job separation rates to employment and nonemployment. In line with descriptive evidence, we find lower job-to-job and higher job-to-nonemployment transition probabilities for women than men when controlling for individual and workplace characteristics and unobserved ...

Do high incomes reflect individual performance?

Income and Employment Effects of Trade and Offshoring in Modern Labor Markets (Dissertation)