Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The First Six Waves of SOEP - The Panel Project in the Years 1983 to 1989

The Employment of Mothers – Recent Developments and their Determinants in East and West Germany

We apply German Mikrozensus data for the period 1996 to 2004 to investigate the employment status of mothers. Specifically, we ask whether there are behavioral differences between mothers in East and West Germany, whether these differences disappear over time, and whether there are differences in the developments for high and low skilled females. We find substantial differences in the employment behavior ...

Poverty and social policy in unified Germany

Labour market related poverty in Germany

Does self-employment really raise job satisfaction? Adaptation and anticipation effects on self-employment and general job changes

Empirical analyses using cross-sectional and panel data found significantly higher levels of job satisfaction for the self-employed than for employees. We argue that by neglecting anticipation and adaptation effects estimates in previous studies might be misleading. To test this, we specify models accounting for anticipation and adaptation to self-employment and general job changes. In contrast to ...

On Developments in the Mean Joint Lifetimes of Three- and Four-Generation Families in Western and Eastern Germany – A model Calculation

This article tackles the question of how, on the one hand, the high life expectancy and, on the other, the increasing age of mothers at childbirth will impact the joint lifetime of three and four generations and will develop in future. To this end, indicators are derived from the official data on mortality and fertility for the mean joint lifetimes of three- and four-generation families. Because of ...

Reference-Dependent Effects of Unemployment on Mental Well-Being

This paper provides an empirical analysis of reference-dependent effects of unemployment on mental well-being. We show that the negative effect of unemployment on mental well-being depends on expectations about the future employment status. Several contributions to the literature have shown that the perception of the individual employment status depends on the surrounding unemployment rate. We argue ...

Public and Private Health Insurance in Germany: The Ignored Risk Selection Problem

While risk selection within the German public health insurance system has received considerable attention, risk selection between public and private health insurers has largely been ignored. This is surprising since - given the institutional structure - risk selection between systems is likely to be more pronounced. We find clear evidence for risk selection in favor of private insurers. While private ...

Making it right? Social norms, handwriting and human capital

I study the forced right-hand writing of left-handed children (switching) as a case where social norms motivate parents to invest in their children. While the previous literature has found that left-handers obtain less human capital and lower wages than right-handers, due to innate cognitive deficits, I find that switched lefthanders actually perform equally well or even better than right-handers in ...

Social Capital as Good Culture (Alfred Marshall Lecture)

To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively conservative priors. As a result, societies can be trapped in a low-trust equilibrium. In this context, a temporary ...