Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Does better education cause higher income?

While the positive influence of higher education on income has been repeatedly confirmed, the linking channel can be ambiguous. Within the framework of estimating the effect of income on life satisfaction, various sources of endogeneity caused by joint determination are addressed and the earnings equation is reconsidered, too: We cast doubt on the hypothesis of the direct influence of educational achievement ...

Social Causation Versus Health Selection in the Life Course: Does Their Relative Importance Differ by Dimension of SES?

A person’s socioeconomic status (SES) can affect health (social causation) and health can affect SES (health selection). The findings for each of these pathways may depend on how SES is measured. We study (1) whether social causation or health selection is more important for overall health inequalities, (2) whether this differs between stages of the life course, and (3) between measures of SES. Using ...

Learning intensity effects in students’ mental and physical health – Evidence from a large scale natural experiment in Germany

In this study, we analyze the health effects of a recent education reform in Germany exposing students to increased learning intensity. The reform shortened the higher secondary education track by one year. As the overall curriculum required for graduation was held constant, this led to an increase in instruction hours in the remaining school years. The reform was introduced at different points in ...

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

Dynamic Properties of Energy Affordability Measures

Measures of affordability and of fuel poverty are applied in practice to assess the affordability of energy services, for example, or of water or housing. The extensive body of literature on affordability measures has little overlap with the existing literature on poverty measurement. A comprehensive assessment of the response of affordability measures as a result of changes in the distribution of ...

The determinants of church attendance and religious human capital in Germany: Evidence from panel data

This paper explores determinants of church attendance and the formation of 'religious human capital' in Germany within a Becker-style allocation-of-time framework. The analysis is based on data derived from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Taking advantage of the longitudinal structure of the data, we are able to control for unobservable heterogeneity by applying a random-effects ...

The impact of introducing social security contributions on "marginal employment" on the labour supply of married women in Germany

Do Catholic women with non-smoking husbands earn less in a second job? - assorted topics in empirical labor economics (Dissertation)

The Attitudes Towards the Euro: An Empirical Study based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Risky Business - The Role of Individual Risk Attitudes in Occupational Choice

This study analyzes the relationship of individual risk attitudes and occupational sorting with respect to occupational earnings risk. By using the German Mikrozensus, a precise measure for earnings risk is computed as the occupation-wide standard deviation of wages. Following the procedure proposed by Bonin (2007), this earnings risk measure is used as dependent variable in cross-sectional and panel ...