Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Reservation Wages, Search Duration, and Accepted Wages in Europe

Do Reservation Wages Really Decline? Some International Evidence on the Determinants of Reservation Wages

Unemployment Benefits and Reservation Wages: Key Elasticities from a Stripped-Down Job Search Approach

This paper exploits survey information on reservation wages and data on actual wages from the European Community Household Panel to deduce, in the manner of Lancaster and Chesher, additional parameters of a stylized structural search model; specifically, reservation wage and transition/duration elasticities. The informational requirements of this approach are minimal, thereby facilitating comparisons ...

Language discrimination in Germany: when evaluation influences objective counting

Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are valued. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation ...

Differences in welfare take-up between immigrants and natives

Research on welfare participation often shows significant differences between immigrants and natives that are often attributed to immigrants' higher risk of welfare dependence. We study whether immigrants in Germany also differ from their German counterparts in their take-up behavior conditional on being eligible for welfare benefits. The empirical approach intends (i) to determine eligibility ...

Benefit Take-Up and Labor Supply Incentives of Interdependent Means-Tested Benefit Programs for Low-Income Households

Using a microsimulation model based on representative panel data, we analyze the outcomes of three major means-tested interdependent benefit programs that are available for low-income households in Germany with respect to benefit take-up and labor supply incentives. The results show a distinct overlap between the programs and high rates of non-take-up, indicating that the effectiveness of the programs ...

Does a Smoking Ban Reduce Smoking? Evidence from Germany

In 2007 and 2008 the 16 German federal states introduced public smoking bans. The prime objective of the smoking bans was to reduce passive smoking. However, a welcomed side-effect of the smoking bans might have been to reduce active smoking. In this paper we investigate whether such a side-effect occurred. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we investigate with fixed-effects ...

Happiness functions with preference interdependence and heterogeneity: the case of altruism within the family

This study investigates the prevalence and extent of altruism by examining the relationship between parents’ and their adult children’s subjective well-being in a data set extracted from the German Socio-Economic Panel. To segregate the share of parents with altruistic preferences from those who are selfish, we estimate a finite mixture regression model. We control for various sources of potential ...

Naming and War in Modern Germany

This paper analyzes naming behavior in Germany in the context of rapid social change. It begins with an overview of general developments in naming in Germany over the last one hundred years, based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which supplies us with almost 45,000 datasets. The paper focuses on the periods of World War II and the Cold War since we conclude that general developments ...

Integrating Immigrants' Children into Labour Markets. The Impact of Individual Social Capital (Master thesis)