Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Microeconometric Evaluations of Education Policies (ifo Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsforschung 57)

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Siegler while working at the Center for the Economics of Education of the Ifo Institute. It was completed in June 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich (LMU) in November 2014. The thesis includes three empirical studies, each of which evaluates one distinct education policy to improve educational outcomes ...

Labor Market Effects of Public Policy (Dissertation)

A short generic measure of work stress in the era of globalization: effort-reward imbalance

We evaluate psychometric properties of a short version of the original effort-reward imbalance (ERI) questionnaire. This measure is of interest in the context of assessing stressful work conditions in the era of economic globalization. In a representative sample of 10,698 employed men and women participating in the longitudinal Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in Germany, a short version of the ERI questionnaire ...

Transitioning Towards More Equality? Wealth Gender Differences and the Changing Role of Explanatory Factors over Time

The objective of the study is to investigate the changing role of explanatory factors of wealth and the gender wealth gap in Germany over the period 2002-2012 using individual level microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The authors apply distributional decomposition methods and focus on the role of changes in labor supply, permanent income, portfolio composition, and marital status in this ...

The Luxembourg Wealth Study - A cross-country comparable database for household wealth research

The paper describes the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS), an international project launched in 2003 by the Luxembourg Income Study and by institutions from Canada, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The aim of the project is to assemble and to harmonise existing micro-data on household wealth, in order to provide a sounder basis for comparative ...

Cross-National Comparison of Income and Wealth Status in Retirement: First Results From the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS)

This paper provides a first glance at the role of income and wealth in comparing economic security of older persons in the United States in cross-national perspective. We compare our elders to those in six other rich OECD countries (Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). These countries have diverse social policy systems, with respect to both social insurance and public assistance; ...

To own or not to own? Household portfolios, demographics and institutions in a cross-national perspective

Using harmonized wealth data and a novel decomposition approach, 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 younger households’ participation decisions in assets are more responsive to income than older households. Family structure plays a significant role in explaining cross-country differences ...

Examining the gender wealth gap in Germany

Economic research on the determinants of gender differences in economic outcomes particularly in income and consumption is well established. Extending these investigations to other outcomes such as wealth up till now has been limited due to lack of individual-level data. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we find a significant ‘raw’ gender wealth gap of 50,000€ for married partners. Decomposition ...

The Distribution of Assets and Debt

Family Gaps in Income: A Cross-National Comparison