Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Gender Effects as Macro-Level Effects: Germany and the United States 1991-1997

My research examines within-nation differences as well as cross-national differences in socially stratified outcomes, specifically the distribution of household incomes. I build on the considerable empirical evidence suggesting that group memberships are important factors in shaping one's life course and in determining the level of social inequality. I examine seven years of longitudinal data ...

Two Approaches to Understanding Control of Voluntary and Involuntary Job Shifts among Germans and Foreigners from 1991 to 1996

German Active Labor Market Policies: The Use of Job Creation and Training Programs Following Unification

The Development and Happiness of Very Young Children

The paper demonstrates how Sen’s (1985) alternative approach to welfare economics can be used to shed light on the wellbeing of very young children. More specifically, we estimate versions of the three key relations from his framework using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, 2012) Survey. Our primary models provide evidence that skills are related to involvement in cognate activities ...

Are Immigrants Paid Less for Education?

This paper is on measuring the gap in returns to education between foreign-born and native workers in France, Germany, and Austria and investigates the extent to which this gap can be explained by a mis-match between the actual and the years of schooling typical for a given occupation. The return to usual years of schooling across different occupations is found to be higher than that for actual years ...

What is Behind Native-Immigrant Social Income Gaps?

Does Switching to a Western German Employer Still Pay Off? An Analysis for Eastern Germany

This paper deals with the medium-term effects of job mobility on the average wage growth of job-movers in eastern Germany. The analysis is based on all employees subject to social insurance contributions working in eastern Germany in 2004. Using a statistical matching procedure combined with a difference-in-differences estimator, we observe that job-movers achieve an average annual wage increase of ...

Equalizing Income Versus Equalizing Opportunity - A Comparison of the United States and Germany

International Income Inequality: Measuring PPP Bias by Estimating Engel Curves for Food

Older or Wealthier? The Impact of Age Adjustment on Wealth Inequality

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory wealth inequality due to age, yet preserves inequality arising from other factors. This new method is superior ...