Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Automatic Stabilizers and Economic Crisis: US vs. Europe

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the US. In the case of an unemployment shock 48 per cent of the shock are absorbed in the EU, compared to 34 ...

Automatic Stabilizers, Economic Crisis and Income Distribution in Europe

This paper investigates to what extent the tax and transfer systems in Europe protect households at different income levels against losses in current income caused by economic downturns like the present financial crisis. We use a multi country micro simulation model to analyse how shocks on market income and employment are mitigated by taxes and transfers. We find that the aggregate redistributive ...

Social Protection as an Automatic Stabilizer

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of social protection systems in Europe and the US to provide (income) insurance against macro level shocks in terms of automatic stabilizers. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38% of a proportional income shock and 47% of an idiosyncratic unemployment shock in Europe, compared to 32% and 34% in the US. There is large heterogeneity within Europe with stabilization ...

Recent evolution of poverty in the European countries

The evolution of economic inequality in the EU countries during the nineties

Age differences in the big five across the life span: Evidence from two national samples

Cross-sectional age differences in the Big Five personality traits were investigated using 2 large datasets from Great Britain and Germany: the British Household Panel Study (BHPS; N >= 14,039) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP; N >= 20,852). Participants, who ranged in age from 16 to the mid-80s, completed a 15-item version of the Big Five Inventory (e.g., John & Srivastava, ...

Introduction

The empirical content of marital surplus in matching models

This note investigates the extent to which structural estimates of marital surplus are informative about subjective well-being and separation. We first estimate the marital surplus using a simple matching model of the marriage market with perfectly transferable utility and heterogeneity in tastes applied to a rich German panel dataset. We then show that these estimates of the marital surplus are negatively ...

Labour Supply after Inheritances and the Role of Expectations

This paper examines the effect of wealth on labour market behaviour. Providing convincing evidence on this relationship is challenging since wealth and labour supply may be endogenously determined. We overcome this by looking at wealth shocks in the form of inheritances, distinguishing between unanticipated and anticipated inheritances. We provide a theoretical framework which outlines how an individual's ...

Cross-National Differences in Wealth Portfolios at the Intensive Margin: Is There a Role for Policy?

Using harmonized wealth data and a novel decomposition approach in this literature, we show that cohort effects exist in the income profiles of asset and debt portfolios for a sample of European countries, the U.S. and Canada. We find that the association between household wealth portfolios at the intensive margin (the level of assets) and household characteristics is different from that found at the ...