Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Social Structure and Social Policy: About the Institutional Flexibility of Three Modern Welfare States

This paper addresses the question of the institutional flexibility of three major European welfare states. Using Data from the second and fifth wave of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we measure first how effectively the German, British and Italian welfare state have responded to changes in their country-specific poverty risks profile. Further, we apply a macro-simulation to evaluate the performance ...

The effects of income taxation on entrepreneurial investment: A puzzle?

We investigate how personal income taxes affect the portfolio share of personal wealth that entrepreneurs invest in their own business. In a portfolio choice model that allows for tax sheltering, we show that lower tax rates may increase investment in entrepreneurial equity at the intensive margin, but decrease it at the extensive margin. Using German panel data, we identify tax effects on the portfolio ...

Investigating the Patterns and Determinants of Life Satisfaction in Germany Following Reunification

Money Does Matter! Evidence from Increasing Real Income and Life Satisfaction in East Germany Following Reunification

The causal effect of income on health: Evidence from German reunification

Socio-Economic Status, Health Shocks, Life Satisfaction and Mortality: Evidence from an Increasing Mixed Proportional Hazard Model

How well do individuals predict their future life satisfaction? Evidence from panel data following a nationwide exogenous shock

The Increasingly Mixed Proportional Hazard Model: An Application to Socioeconomic Status, Health Shocks, and Mortality

We introduce a duration model that allows for unobserved cumulative individual-specific shocks, which are likely to be important in explaining variations in duration outcomes, such as length of life and time spent unemployed. The model is also a useful tool in situations where researchers observe a great deal of information about individuals when first interviewed in surveys but little thereafter. ...

Job Search with Nonparticipation

How much of a socialist legacy? The re-emergence of entrepreneurship in the East German transformation to a market economy

We investigate how institutional change—the transition from a socialist system to a western type market economy—relates to the re-emergence of entrepreneurship in East Germany. This region is particularly well suited for such a study because of the rapid change of the institutional framework and the possibility to use West Germany as a benchmark. It took about 15 years until self-employment levels ...