Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Empirical Content of the Job Search Model: Labor Mobility and Wage Distributions in Europe and the US

How Does Heterogeneity Shape the Socioeconomic Gradient in Health Satisfaction?

Individual heterogeneity plays a key role in explaining variation in self-reported well-being and, in particular, health satisfaction. It is hypothesised that the influence of this heterogeneity varies over levels of health and increases over the life-cycle. These hypotheses are tested with data on health satisfaction from 22 waves of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP).Nonlinear fixed effects methods ...

Socio-economic inequalities in bodily pain over the lifecycle: Longitudinal evidence from Australia, Britain and Germany

We document the extent of socio-economic status (SES) inequalities in bodily pain in Australia, Britain and Germany, with a particular focus on whether such inequalities widen over the life course. Random-effects logistic and kernel regressions are used to estimate odds ratios of experiencing severe pain by income, educational qualification and occupational status, and to graph age–pain profiles, while ...

Research Indicates Happiness is Not Just Gene Deep

Stability and Change in Risk-Taking Propensity Across the Adult Life Span

Can risk-taking propensity be thought of as a trait that captures individual differences across domains, measures, and time? Studying stability in risk-taking propensities across the life span can help to answer such questions by uncovering parallel, or divergent, trajectories across domains and measures. We contribute to this effort by using data from respondents aged 18 to 85 in the German Socio-Economic ...

Income Distribution and the Business Cycle in Germany: A Semiparametric Approach

The question of how the distribution of income is influenced by the state of the economy is important for understanding the economic mechanisms linking micro- and macro-level variables. There is no generally applicable theory on how the distribution of household incomes is influenced by changed macroeconomic conditions. This paper adapts an empirical approach in order to investigate this relationship ...

A Satisfaction-Driven Poverty Indicator - A Bustle Around the Poverty Line

Poverty line definitions in use often lack a solid scientific foundation. This paper proposes to exploit data on income satisfaction to construct an evidence-based poverty line. The poverty line is identified by using its assumed unique property to explain income dissatisfaction best among all dichotomizations of income. To this end, several model settings are considered including linear and nonlinear ...

Econometric Analyses of Subjective Welfare and Income Inequality (Thesis)

University or job training: Korea and Germany compared

This study is the first to empirically compare the economic returns of human capital in South Korea and Germany. The study, based on the Mincer earnings model (1974), tested whether the wage gap between university graduates and those with lower educational levels is wider in South Korea than in Germany, due to differences in job training. The study estimated the wage gaps by employing random effects ...

Two Aspects of Labor Mobility: A Bivariate Poisson Regression Approach

The study introduces a distinction between two types of labor mobility. Direct job to job changes (which are assumed to be voluntary) and job changes after experiencing an unemployment spell (assumed to be involuntary). Exploiting the close relationship between those two phenomena we adopt a bivariate regression framework for our empirical analysis of data on male individuals in the German labor market. ...