Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

A Tale of Two Countries - A Comparison of Unemployment Spells in the United Kingdom and Germany

On the Economics and Biology of Trust

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic interactions has proven to be elusive. It is still not clear whether trust is just an epiphenomenon of good ...

A Nation-Wide Laboratory - Examining trust and trustworthiness by integrating behavioral experiments into representative surveys

Private Retirement Savings in Germany: The Structure of Tax Incentives and Annuitization

Risk Sharing and Efficiency Implications of Progressive Pension Arrangements

This paper aims to quantify the welfare effects of progressive pension arrangements in Germany. Starting from a purely contribution-related benefit system, we introduce basic allowances for contributions and a flat benefit fraction. Since our overlapping-generations model takes into account variable labor supply, borrowing constraints as well as stochastic income risk, we can compare the labor supply, ...

Social security with rational and hyperbolic consumers

Flexible Employment as a Unidirectional Career? Results from Field Experiments

Although the number of flexible workers is constantly growing, little is known about career paths built up on flexible employment. In this article, we investigate the chances of former flexible workers to be employed in a permanent full-time position. In two field experiments, we asked for employers’ evaluation of applicants with a flexible employment history. Results indicate that former part-time ...

Taxes and Market Hours: The Role of Gender and Skill

Cross-country differences of market hours in 17 OECD countries are mainly due to the hours of women, especially low-skilled women. This paper develops a model to account for the gender-skill differences in market hours across countries. The model explains a substantial fraction of the differences in hours by taxes, which reduce market hours in favor of leisure and home production, and by subsidized ...

Social Subsidies and Marketization – the Role of Gender and Skill

This paper decomposes the differences in aggregate market hours between US and Europe across gender-skill groups and finds that low-skilled women are the biggest contributors to aggregate differences, with the exception of Nordic countries. We develop a model to account for the gender-skill differences in market hours across countries. Taxes, which reduce market hours in favor of leisure and home production, ...

Facets of Subjective Health Horizons Are Differentially Linked to Brain Volume

An active lifestyle including physical exercise and novelty processing is considered to promote brain health. Also, subjective future time perspectives (FTP) are known to shape motivation and goal-directed behavior, with links to objective health, well-being, and cognition. Nevertheless, the links between subjective FTP and brain physiology are largely unknown. We report data from 326 healthy older ...