Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Refugees in Germany with Children Still Living Abroad Have Lowest Life Satisfaction

Family strongly influences personal well-being—especially in the case of refugees, whose family members often remain in their homeland. This report is the first to closely examine the well-being and family structures of refugees who came to Germany between January 2013 and January 2016. It uses data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany. Among individuals aged between 18 and 49, nine ...

The Open Unemployment Trap: Life at the Intersection of Labour Market and Welfare State. The Case of Germany

Fixed-Term Contracts at Labour Market Entry in West Germany: Implications for Job Search and First Job Quality

Fixed-term contracts have become very relevant in the transition from school to work. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for the period 1984–2006, this article analyses differences in the timing of receiving a fixed-term contract or a permanent contract throughout the duration of first-job search and whether fixed-term contracts are associated with lower initial wages. Competing ...

Early career consequences of temporary employment in Germany and the UK

This article investigates the effects of temporary employment at labour market entry on subsequent individual careers, drawing on data from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) from the period 1991 to 2007. The results show that German temporarily employed entrants suffer from higher initial wage penalties and risks of temporary employment cycles but ...

Is a Temporary Job Better Than Unemployment? A Cross-country Comparison Based on British, German, and Swiss Panel Data

While many previous studies on temporary work have found disadvantages for temporary workers as compared to workers with a permanent contract, this study compares temporary work to the alternative of unemployment. Specifically, this paper investigates the potential integrative power of taking up a temporary job for unemployed workers as compared to the counterfactual situation of remaining unemployed ...

The effects of unemployment and temporary employment on leaving the parental home in Germany

Educational Expansion and its Heterogeneous Returns for Wage Workers

The paper examines the evolution of returns to education in the West German labour market over the last two decades. During this period, graduates from the period of educational expansion in the sixties and seventies entered the labour market and an upgrading of the skill structure took place. In order to tackle the issues of endogeneity of schooling and its heterogeneous returns we apply two estimation ...

The impact of employment transitions on health in Germany. A difference-in-differences propensity score matching approach

This article investigates the effects of transitions between employment and unemployment on health. It also addresses the question of whether or not the widespread use of temporary employment has altered the positive health effects of employment. Drawing on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1995-2010, we apply difference-in-differences propensity score matching to identify the ...

Does Relationship Specific Investment Depend on Asset Ownership? Evidence From a Natural Experiment in the Housing Market

In this paper, I test the most basic prediction of Grossman and Hart (1986, The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration. Journal of Political Economy, 691-719): allocations of asset ownership that expose a party to ex-post expropriation reduce this party’s exante relationship-specific investments. In the empirical context of the German housing market, I find that ...

The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)