Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Income Mobility in the United States and Germany: A Comparison of Two Classes of Mobilty Measures using the GSOEP, PSID, and CPS

The United States is often considered to be more free-wheeling and mobile than Germany; however, previous cross-national studies of income mobility find the opposite is true. This paper investigates these surprising results and finds that they are confirmed when income mobility is measured by changes in the positions of individuals in the income distribution — members of former West German households ...

Neighbourhood effects in cross-Atlantic perspective: A longitudinal analysis of impacts on intergenerational mobility in the USA and Germany

Research in the USA provides evidence that neighbourhood conditions affect intergenerational mobility. However, what remains unclear is the extent to which the US context is unique in producing this influence. To examine this question, the present study directly compares neighbourhood effects on intergenerational mobility in the USA versus those in Germany – a country whose housing market and social ...

The effect of a ban on gender-based pricing on risk selection in the German health insurance market

Starting from December 2012, insurers in the European Union were prohibited from charging gender-discriminatory prices. We examine the effect of this unisex mandate on risk segmentation in the German health insurance market. While gender used to be a pricing factor in Germany’s private health insurance (PHI) sector, it was never used as a pricing factor in the social health insurance (SHI) sector. ...

Design-features of bubble-prone experimental asset markets with a constant FV

Experimental asset markets with a constant fundamental value ($$\mathrm {\textsc {fv}}$$FV) have grown in importance in recent years. A methodological examination of the robustness of experimental results in such a setting which has been shown to produce bubbles, however, is lacking. In a laboratory experiment with 280 subjects, we investigate whether specific design features are sufficient to influence ...

Vulnerability to poverty revisited: Flexible modeling and better predictive performance

This paper analyzes several modifications to improve a simple measure of vulnerability as expected poverty. Firstly, in order to model income, we apply distributional regression relating potentially each parameter of the conditional income distribution to the covariates. Secondly, we determine the vulnerability cutoff endogenously instead of defining a household as vulnerable if its probability of ...

Maternity Leave in the Context of Couples: The impact of both partners' characteristics and employment experiences on mothers' re-entry into the labour market

This research focuses on re-entry for mothers after maternity leave. The empirical analysis focuses on the first twenty-two years of post-reunification Germany, using proportional hazards models. Results show that the re-entry into part-time employment is primarily affected by the mother’s own resources and former career, the return to full-time work is more linked to the partner’s resources. This ...

Host-country cultural capital and labour market trajectories of migrants in Germany

The paper investigates effects of host-country orientation and cultural difference of migrants on their socio-economic integration in Germany, using SOEP data for the years 1988-2006. We analyze unemployment and employment durations of male and female migrants, as well as transitions from domestic work to employment for female migrants from Turkey, former Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain and Italy. Given ...

Impact of working hours on work-life balance

Nowadays, flexible working hours are becoming important to the workplaces. A lot of organizations offer flexible working hours to employees due to the benefits that flexibility gives to both employee and employer. Greater employee productivity and higher organization profitability are the most common benefits. Also, flexible working hours promote and facilitate work-life balance. Reduced stress and ...

The Effect of Social Transfers in Europe: An Empirical Analysis Using Generalised Lorenz Curves

European Schemes of Social Assistance: An Empirical Analysis of Set-Ups and Distributive Impacts