Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Distributional Effects of Subsidizing Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Germany

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme is almost distributionally neutral when looking at standard inequality measures. This is due to two offsetting ...

Institutions, technological change and the wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers: theory and evidence from Europe

High School Vocational Education, Apprenticeship, and Earnings: A Comparison of Germany and the United States

Earnings Losses and Unemployment of Displaced Workers in Germany

Individual Heterogeneity, Job Matching, and Returns to Tenure in Germany

Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to examine the roles of individual heterogeneity and job match quality in generating commonly observed wagetenure profiles. The evidence presented in the paper indicates that once those factors are reflected in the estimations, the returns to seniority are no longer measurable. Job match quality appears to be the dominant factor in the German labor ...

Intergenerational Correlations in Labor Market Status: A Comparison of the United States and Germany

Non-linear patterns of intergenerational mobility in Germany and the United States

Does Solo Self-Employment Serve as a 'Stepping Stone' to Employership?

This paper examines the extent to which solo self-employment serves as a vehicle for job creation. Using panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, a dynamic multinomial logit model of transitions between labour market states is estimated. The empirical strategy closely follows that used in a previous study employing household data from Germany by Lechmann ...

Worlds of Working Poverty. Cross-National Variation in the Mechanisms that Lead Poverty among Workers

The objective of this paper is to distinguish between different types of working poverty, on the basis of the mechanisms that produce it. Whereas the poverty literature identifies a myriad of risk factors and of categories of disadvantaged workers, we focus on three immediate causes of working poverty, namely low wage rate, weak labour force attachment, and high needs, the latter mainly due to the ...

Sharing the Wealth - An Empirical Analysis in Income Shocks and Intra-Family Transfers in Germany