Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Women's labor force transitions in connection with childbirth: A panel data comparison between Germany, Sweden and Great Britain

Labour supply and commuting

We examine the effect of commuting distance on workers’ labour supply patterns, distinguishing between weekly labour supply, number of workdays per week and daily labour supply. We account for endogeneity of distance by using employer-induced changes in distance. In Germany, distance has a slight positive effect on daily and weekly labour supply, but no effect on the number of workdays. The effect ...

Start Time and Worker Compensation: Implications for Staggered-Hours Programs

There is little known about the effects of staggered-hours programs that affect workers’ working schedules to mitigate peak congestion. We examine the effect of workers’ morning start times on their wages for Germany. In contrast to previous work based on cross-section data, we demonstrate that wages are not, or may be, a slight inverse U-shaped function of start time suggesting that staggered-hours ...

Are workers with a long commute less productive? An empirical analysis of absenteeism

We hypothesise, and test for, a negative effect of the length of the worker's commute on worker's productivity, by examining whether the commute has a positive effect on worker's absenteeism. We identify this effect using employer-induced changes in commuting distance. Our estimates for Germany indicate that commuting distance induces absenteeism with an elasticity of about 0.07 to 0.09. ...

The ABC of Social Desires: Affiliation, Being Alone, and Closeness to Partner

We propose a triadic model of social desires directed at appetence/aversion of affiliation with friends (A), being alone (B), and closeness to one’s partner (C) that account for individual differences in subjectively experienced needs for proximity and distance in serious couple relationships. The model assumes that A, B, and C can be conceptualized at the individual level as correlated latent factors ...

Changing educational gradient in long-term care-free life expectancy among German men, 1997-2012

Background: The inverse association between mortality and individual socioeconomic status is well-documented. Due to the lack of appropriate data, little is known about the nature of this association among individuals with long-term care (LTC) needs. Objectives: We aim to fill in this knowledge gap by estimating life expectancy (LE), life expectancy without (CFLE) and with (CLE) long-term care by education ...

Inequality in Human Development: An Empirical Assessment of 32 Countries

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a comparison of the level in human development of the poor with the level of the non-poor within countries, but also ...

Saving Behavior and Housing Wealth Evidence from German Micro Data

Housing property is the most important position in a household’s wealth portfolio. Even though there is strong evidence that house price cycles and saving patterns behave synchronously, the underlying causes remain controversial. The present paper examines if there is a wealth effect of house prices on savings using household-level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1996-2012. ...

Income Maximization and the Selection and Sorting of International Migrants

Two prominent features of international labor movements are that the more educated are more likely to emigrate (positive selection) and more educated migrants are more likely to settle in destination countries with high rewards to skill (positive sorting). Using data on emigrant stocks by schooling level and source country in OECD destinations, we find that a simple model of income maximization can ...

Increasing Persistent Poverty in Germany