Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Unobserved Heterogeneity and Risk in Wage Variance: Does Schooling Provide Earnings Insurance?

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education to data for the USA, the UK and Germany. We find that in residual wage variation, uncertainty by far dominates unobserved heterogeneity. The relation between uncertainty and level of education is not monotonic and differs among countries.

Child Care Center Quality: Measurement Issues and Links to Child Developmental Outcomes

Dual Embeddedness: Informal Job Matching and Labor Market Institutions in the United States and Germany

Drawing on the embeddedness, varieties of capitalism and macrosociological life course perspectives, we examine how institutional arrangements affect network-based job finding behaviors in the United States and Germany. Analysis of cross-national survey data reveals that informal job matching is highly clustered among specific types of individuals and firms in the United States, whereas it is more ...

Search, Effort, and Locus of Control

We test the hypothesis that locus of control - one’s perception of control over events in life - influences search by affecting beliefs about the efficacy of search effort in a laboratory experiment. We find that reservation offers and effort are increasing in the belief that one’s efforts influence outcomes when subjects exert effort without knowing how effort influences the generation of offers but ...

Who benefits? A Comparison of Welfare and Outcomes for the Unemployed in Britain and Germany (Dissertation)

How do different welfare states respond to the challenge of unemployment? Comparing Britain and Germany in the 1990s, the main focus of this thesis is on how welfare policies affect outcomes for individuals unemployed persons. The interaction of the state, labour markets and household structures is considered crucial in understanding these outcomes. The selection of countries – Britain and Germany ...

Dealing with negative marginal utilities in the discrete choice modelling of labour supply

In discrete choice labor supply analysis, it is often reasonably expected that utility will increase with income. Yet, analyses based on discrete choice models sometimes mention that, when no restriction is imposed a priori in the optimization program, the monotonicity condition is not fully satisfied ex post. In order to overcome this limitation, some authors impose restrictions that may appear to ...

Lessons from Building and Using Euromod

Social Indicators and other Income Statistics using EUROMOD: an assessment of the 2001 baseline and changes 1998-2001

Marginal employment for welfare recipients: stepping stone or obstacle?

Marginal employment (ME) is one of the largest forms of atypical employment in Germany. We analyse whether ME has a ‘stepping stone’ function for unemployed individuals, i.e., whether ME increases the subsequent probability of regular employment. We find differing treatment effects by unemployment duration. According to our results, ME increases the likelihood of regular employment within a 3-year ...

An econometric model of healthcare demand with nonlinear pricing

From 2004 to 2012, the German social health insurance levied a co-payment for the first doctor visit in a calendar quarter. We develop a new model for estimating the effect of such a co-payment on the individual number of visits per quarter. The model combines a one-time increase in the otherwise constant hazard rate determining the timing of doctor visits with a difference-in-differences strategy ...