Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Information Asymmetries Between Parents and Educators in German Childcare Institutions

Economic theory predicts market failure in the market for early childhood education and care (ECEC) due to information asymmetries. We empirically investigate information asymmetries between parents and ECEC professionals in Germany, making use of a unique extension of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). It allows us to compare quality perceptions by parents and pedagogic staff of 734 ECEC ...

Does Better, Cheaper Day Care Make for More Satisfied Parents?

Following the major expansion of day care provision in recent years, the quality of these programs has increasingly also been the subject of public debate. When evaluating the quality of German day care centers, experts have frequently concluded that there is considerable room for improvement. Apart from considering expert opinions, it is also interesting to look at how parents as guardians rate the ...

Family and Labor Market Policies in Germany: The Well-Being of Working Women

In Germany, women’s participation in the labor market has historically differed from that of men. Despite recent efforts on the part of the federal government to support policies that encourage labor force participation for women, large gender gaps in employment remain. This chapter explores the way historical and cultural trends have led to the differences in labor market status for women in Germany ...

Female Earnings and the Level and Distribution of Household Income in Developed Countries

A Contribution to the Positive Theory of Direct Taxation

Economic Uncertainty, Parental Selection, and the Criminal Activity of the 'Children of the Wall'

We study the link between parental selection and children criminality in a new context. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany experienced an unprecedented temporary drop in fertility driven by economic uncertainty. We exploit this natural experiment to estimate that the children from these (smaller) cohorts are 40 percent more likely to commit crimes. We show that women who gave birth at ...

Measuring poverty within and between population subgroups

Matching with a Handicap: The Case of Smoking in the Marriage Market

We develop a matching model on the marriage market, where individuals have preferences over the smoking status of potential mates, and over their socioeconomic quality. Spousal smoking is bad for non-smokers, but it is neutral for smokers, while individuals always prefer high socioeconomic quality. Furthermore, there is a gender difference in smoking prevalence, there being more smoking men than smoking ...

Posterior simulation and Bayes factors in panel count data models

This paper is concerned with the problems of posterior simulation and model choice for Poisson panel data models with multiple random effects. Efficient algorithms based on Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for sampling the posterior distribution are developed. A new parameterization of the random effects and fixed effects is proposed and compared with a parameterization in common use, and computation ...

The Labor Market Status of Immigrants: Effects of the Unemployment Rate at Arrival and Duration of Residence