Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

What Have Two Decades of British Economic Reform Delivered?

Workplace Heterogeneity and the Rise of West German Wage Inequality

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit in four sub-intervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage structure and can explain nearly all of the dramatic rise in West German wage ...

Opening the Black Box of Primary Effects: Relative Risk Aversion and Maternal Time Investments in Preschool Children

Judging from the abundant and expanding literature on educational inequalities, the apparent consensus is that divergent educational outcomes of individuals can be explained by two main mechanisms: classspecific differences in children’s skills (primary effects) and educational choices, net of skills (secondary effects). Contrary to the widespread agreement that primary effects stem from differences ...

Measuring cultural capital: Sense of entitlement, concerted cultivation, leisure activities, gatekeeper bias and skills

Feeling German: The impact of education on immigrants’ national identification

In this study, we investigate the role of education in immigrants’ identification with the host society. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and latent growth curve mediation models, we test the immigration paradox hypothesis (de Vroome et al. 2011), which claims that highly educated immigrants identify less with the host society, due to their higher sensitivity to discriminatory experiences. ...

The Fall in German Unemployment: A Flow Analysis

In this paper we investigate the recent fall in unemployment, and the rise in part-time work, labour market participation, inequality and welfare in Germany. Unemployment fell because the Hartz IV reform induced a large fraction of the long-term unemployed to deregister as jobseekers and appear as non-participants. Yet, labour force participation increased because many unregistered-unemployed workers ...

Intergenerational Transmission of Language Capital and Economic Outcomes

Immigrants' Identity, Economic Outcomes and the Transmission of Identity across Generations

In this article we address three issues relating to immigrants' identity, measured as the feeling of belonging to particular ethnic groups. We study the formation of identity with home and host countries. We investigate how identity with either country relates to immigrants' and their children's labour market outcomes. Finally, we analyse the intergenerational transmission of identity. ...

Immigrants, Natives and Social Assistance: Comparable Take-Up Under Comparable Circumstances

Virtual Life Satisfaction

We study life satisfaction data from the 2005 World Values Survey and a 2009 survey of users of the virtual world Second Life. Second Life users do not have the same demographic profile as the general population, but the differences are not as large as we expected. The mechanisms and causes of life satisfaction seem to be similar in the two samples. Among Second Life users, satisfaction with their ...