Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Education, Gender and Earnings in France and Germany: Level and Dispersion Effects

Returns to Education in West Germany. An Empirical Assessment

Education and Earnings in Europe - Germany

Estimating Incentive and Welfare Effects of Nonstationary Unemployment Benefits

The distribution of unemployment duration in our equilibrium matching model with spell-dependent unemployment benefits displays time-varying exit rates. Building on semi-Markov processes, we translate these rates into an expression for the aggregate unemployment rate. Structural estimation using German microdata allows us to discuss the effects of an unemployment benefit reform (Hartz IV). The reform ...

Unemployment Benefits and Unemployment Rates of Low-Skilled and Elder Workers in West Germany: A Search Equilibrium Approach

The Use of Respondent Incentives on Longitudinal Surveys

Mental Illness and Unhappiness

This paper is a contribution to the second World Happiness Report. It makes five main points. 1. Mental health is the biggest single predictor of life-satisfaction. This is so in the UK, Germany and Australia even if mental health is included with a six-year lag. It explains more of the variance of life-satisfaction in the population of a country than physical health does, and much more than unemployment ...

The Causes of Happiness and Misery

The Marginal Utility of Income

Does Relative Income Matter? Are the Critics Right?

Do other peoples’ incomes reduce the happiness which people in advanced countries experience from any given income? And does this help to explain why in the U.S., Germany and some other advanced countries, happiness has been constant for many decades? The answer to both questions is ‘Yes’. We provide 4 main pieces of evidence. 1) In the U.S. General Survey (repeated samples since 1972) comparator income ...