Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Differential employment prospects among atypical employees: Effects of type of contract or worker preference?

The paper analyses transitions between atypical and regular employment, focusing on the effects of different types of atypical employment on the transition probability to full-time and long-term employment. Theoretically, differences by type of contract are to be expected due to the specific functions of types of employment contracts for employers. Fixed-term contracts are often used for prolonged ...

Demographic Trends and the Changing Ability of Households to Buffer Poverty Risks in Germany

The article investigates how demographic trends influenced households’ abilities to compensate for low or lacking earnings among their members. I focus on the probability that household earnings excluding those of the respondent are above the poverty threshold. The share of households where this is the case declined sharply between 1993–1996 and 2009–2012, implying a deterioration of households’ potential ...

Poverty Trends in Germany and Great Britain: The Impact of Changes in Labour Markets, Families, and Social Policy

Jan Brülle shows how poverty risks in Germany between 1992 and 2012 increased concentrated on those with low educational levels, in lower occupational positions, and with precarious employment careers, as the country’s welfare state failed to adapt to widening inequalities in households’ market incomes. Contrasting the German experience with Great Britain, where social transfers to low-income families ...

Changing labour market risks in the service economy: Low wages, part-time employment and the trend in working poverty risks in Germany

The article presents an analysis of the development of labour market risks in Germany in light of changing working poverty risks. Low hourly wages and part-time employment are identified as the main demand-side-related mechanisms for household poverty. Their measurement and development are discussed as well as their contribution to trends in working poverty risks. A rise in low wages, especially among ...

Poverty and Time

Moving up or moving out? Transitions through part-time employment in Britain and Germany

A central issue underlying the concept of transitional labour markets is that moving between different employment statuses can lead to social integration rather than exclusion. In this chapter we assess the extent to which part-time work provides an integrating bridge for those outside the labour market in Britain and Germany. Structural divisions in a given labour market can have a significant effect ...

Deconstructing the hedonic treadmill: Is happiness autoregressive?

Affective habituation is well-documented in social sciences: people seem to adapt to many life events, ranging from lottery windfalls to terminal illnesses. A group of studies have tried to measure habituation by seeing how lagged values of life events affect present happiness. We propose an additional adaptation channel: current happiness may depend directly on past happiness, which amounts to assessing ...

Early Career Mobility and Earning Profiles of German Apprentices: Theory and Empirical Evidence

Measuring the Effects of Socio-Economic Variables on the Income Distribution: An Application to the East German Transition Process

This paper develops a discrete variant of the semiparametric methodology of DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996) (DFL) to measure the effects of socio-economic variables on the income distribution. Although the proposed method is also based on the calculation of hypothetical income distributions by reweighting the original population, it is much easier to implement. The framework is applied to examine ...

Unemployment, Retirement and Female Labor Market Participation and Income Inequality: A Decompositing Analysis for Germany

This paper employs unvariate and multivariate inequality decompositions by subgroup in order to investigate how changes in unemployment, retirement and female labor market participation are related to changes of income inequality in Germany. The results suggest that a considerable share of the inequality increase in East Germany between 1990 to 1995 can be explained by compositional effects of these ...